Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal speaks during a news conference last week as he announces he has vetoed legislation allowing clergy to refuse performing gay marriage and protecting people who refuse to attend the ceremonies. The Republican rejected the bill, saying “I have examined the protections that this bill proposes to provide to the faith based community and I can find no examples of any of those circumstances occurring in our state.” (AP Photo/David Goldman)The Tennessee House of Representatives today is set to debate and vote on an unnecessary and possibly damaging religious freedom bill that is purported to protect counselors from lawsuits and licensing threats if they refuse to treat a client whose behavior conflicts with their “sincerely held religious beliefs.”
The words “gay” or “transgender” are nowhere in the bill pushed by the Family Action Council of Tennessee, a group headed by our own former state Sen. David Fowler “to defend a culture that values the traditional family.” But in discussions of the bill, those words – gay and transgender – have often been used, along with the term “religious freedoms.” A Senate version of the measure passed in February.
Presently, Tennessee law incorporates the American Counseling Association Code of Ethics process of referring a case to another counselor if it exceeds his or her expertise, but it does not allow a counselor to refer a client away based solely on his or her own personally held beliefs.
The Tennessee bill would basically allow a counselor to say, “I don’t work with gay people,” a reality that just opens the door for discrimination. Next it will be physicians, EMTs, insurance companies, grocers, car salesmen or teachers.
This bill is part of a wave of anti-gay and anti-transgender sentiment sweeping the country – and especially the South, where lawmakers and leaders in North Carolina, Georgia and Arkansas already have tried to insert the government into both sexual and religious freedoms. Talk about overreach!