Bradley County Commissioner Howard Thompson and a local pastor have filed a lawsuit to stop the county from issuing marriage licenses and to have the state’s marriage license law declared invalid in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing same-sex marriage.
The suit was filed Thursday in Bradley County Circuit Court by attorney and conservative former state senator David Fowler, with the Constitutional Government Defense Fund.
It’s the second lawsuit Fowler has filed in less than a month challenging Tennessee’s marriage laws in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in June. The legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, Thomas H. Castelli, said the suits “are just another attempt to get around the Supreme Court’s ruling that the freedom to marry is a fundamental right.”
According to the suit filed against County Clerk Donna Simpson, the high court’s ruling last year invalidated state marriage laws that exclude same-sex couples, which Tennessee’s explicitly does.
Since the Tennessee General Assembly has not adopted new laws, the suit states, no valid marriage licenses can be issued. Anyone who performs a marriage can’t return a signed license to the county clerk, and failing to do so is a misdemeanor. Anyone who marries a couple considered “not capable” of being married can be charged with a misdemeanor and fined up to $500 – and lack of a valid license means no couple is capable, the suit states.