David FowlerNASHVILLE -- Today's U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage in Tennessee and across the country is coming under fire from former Sen. David Fowler, who as a Republican lawmaker from Signal Mountain spearheaded the movement to pass a 2006 amendment to the state constitution banning such recognition.
"Today a handful of Americans on the Court have stripped the people of the freedom to democratically address the meaning and role of society's most fundamental institution, marriage," Fowler said in a statement on the 5-4 ruling.
Fowler, who now heads the socially conservative Family Action Council of Tennessee, charged "the majority have arrogantly said they are not only smarter than the 50 million Americans who have voted to affirm marriage as the union of a man and a woman, but also millions of human beings over thousands of years across the entire globe."
Likening the ruling to the landmark Supreme Court ruling on abortion in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case, Fowler said "the Court has taken sides on a domestic policy not addressed in our Constitution and told believers in natural marriage that their voice is not allowed."
But Fowler predicted that "when people begin to experience the effects of this ruling in ways they never envisioned, the Court may find that it has only awakened a slumbering giant."
Fowler was the sponsor of the amendment to the Tennessee Constitution defining marriage as being between one man and one woman.