A Tennessee Republican still waging war on same-sex marriage issues threat days before Christmas.
Even though six months have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, there are still pockets of resistance across America.Â
Take Tennessee, which has a task force created to study and recommend how the State should respond to the historic ruling.
Although the tsk force has been meeting regularly, it has yet to issue a recommendation, but that hasn’t stopped Tennessee Republican state Rep. Rick Womick from issuing an opinion.
“The state Constitution says that marriage is between one man and one woman, and my personal belief is that God says that marriage is between one man and one woman,” Womick told the Daily News Journal. “He created Adam and Eve. God didn’t create Adam and Winston.”
Womick says, in resonse to the Supreme Court ruling, the State of Tennessee should stop issuing marriage licenses, period.
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“That would take the state out of the marriage business altogether,” says Womick, who, after the June marriage ruling in Obergefell sent an official letter on his State House office stationery to all 95 county clerks telling them to “ignore the recent SCOTUS opinion redefining marriage, uphold our State Constitution, and issue marriage certificates to one man and one woman only.”
Womick insists marriage “is a state-sovereignty issue,” and the U.S. Supreme Court justces “have no business ruling on it to begin with. What we have up there is an oligarchy of five individuals declaring their will on the rest of the country.”
“If the Supreme Court will not allow us as a sovereign state to issue marriage licenses as we have decided, then we won’t issue them at all,” Womick said. “If [the deciding five members of the Supreme Court] want to play this game, we are not going to abide by what they said,” he added.
“The Supreme Court is not going to force the state of Tennessee to issue same-sex marriage licenses. We’ll just stop issuing marriage licenses period. You can’t force us to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples or to men or women.”
Womick, who co-sponsored a bill establishing the Bible as the Official State Book, did not offer a solution to couples who wish to marry and be able to prove their union is legal, which affects their ability to access over 1100 federal benefits.
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Image: Screenshot via YouTube