Laws lose tainted terms

NASHVILLE—Tennessee laws no longer will include terms such as “ idiot,” “lunatic,” “mentally retarded” and “handicapped” under a bill sent by the House on Thursday to Gov. Bill Haslam.

Sponsors of the legislation, however, hesitated when it came to changing one law that forbids issuing marriage licenses when the applicants appear to be “drunk, insane or an imbecile.”

While the rest of the bill simply substitutes new words or phrases for outdated or “politically incorrect” ones, the marriage license change could have impacted the substance of a law, said Sen. Douglas Henry, D-Nashville, one of the bill’s sponsors.

Henry said advocates from groups including The Arc Tennessee, which advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, brought the legislation to him.

“They wanted those terms removed, and so I asked the bill be drawn doing just that and not changing the legal effects in any section,” Henry said.

But Henry said language seeking to remove the words “imbecile” and “insane” from the marriage section was removed after legislative attorneys told him “you’re going to change the marriage law.”

“So I said, ‘OK, take that out and we’ll do it with another bill,’” said Henry, who often sponsors legislation intended to benefit people with mental illness and mental disabilities. “I represented to the interested parties that I didn’t want to do that if it changed the law.”

Carrie Guiden, executive director of The Arc Tennessee, said the purpose of the bill “was to just modernize the language so that it’s more politically correct and less offensive to people with disabilities, people with mental illnesses.

“The intent was to make the language more in line with the field today,” she said.

Many of the terms being changed such as “idiot” and “imbecile” have become derogatory over time, she said.

With regard to the marriage license section, she said, the issue was “how do you make the judgment call?”

But she said legislative attorneys were “worried that we were changing the intent of the law, and our bill was really just to change language.”

“We couldn’t come to agreement with the legal department that, if we just deleted the word ‘imbecile,’ it wasn’t going to make a difference because how do you judge whether or not somebody is an imbecile?” she said.

The law originated in 1937. In the early part of the 20th century when the eugenics movement was in full swing, a number of states passed laws aimed at preventing people deemed unfit to marry. An imbecile was someone with an IQ of 20 to 49.

Hamilton County Clerk Bill Knowles has been in office for nearly four decades and noted that, “in all my years I don’t recall but two cases we had any doubt about.”

“I do remember one that was sort of mentally unbalanced and one of the parents even talked to me and gave me a heads up,” said Knowles, who knew the family.

Noting he is no health professional, Knowles said the law “leaves a wide gap there maybe for somebody to try to interpret if you don’t have their family interests.”

But Knowles observed that “you still wouldn’t want to issue a license to anybody who was intoxicated. They may wake up married and didn’t mean to.”