Human rights groups spoke out on Wednesday against an overwhelming vote by Southern Baptists, the US’s largest Protestant denomination, to endorse a resolution that would seek to overturn the legalization ofsame-marriageby theUS supreme court.
“Marriage equality is settled law. Love is love, and the right forLGBTQ+couples to marry is supported by an overwhelming majority of the American public,” said Laurel Powell, communications director of Human Rights Campaign, in a statement to the Guardian.
Powell called the proposal – which included language that legislators have a duty to “pass laws that reflect the truth of creation and natural law – about marriage, sex, human life, and family” – an example of newly boldened attacks from the Christian right.
“This is a very visible example of how attacks on the LGBTQ+ community as a whole have intensified, even as politicians take aim at transgender people as a tactic to divide us,” Powell said. “We will never stop fighting to love who we love and be who we are.”
At the Southern Baptists annual convention inDallasthis week, delegations passed a wide-ranging resolution calling for the “overturning of laws and court rulings, including Obergefell v Hodges, that defy God’s design for marriage and family”.
While a reversal of Obergefell, the supreme court case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in June 2015, wouldn’t itself enact a ban on gay marriage, the resolution also called “for laws that affirm marriage between one man and one women”.
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which has long opposed same-sex marriage, has around 13 million members and about 47,000 cooperating churches.
And despite the SBC’s beliefs, a 2022public pollfound that same-sex marriage has the support of over 70% of Americans.
Still, this week was the first time that the convention has voted to end the right to same-sex marriage.
Andrew Walker, an ethicist at a Southern Baptist seminary in Kentucky who authored the convention’s resolution titled “On Restoring Moral Clarity Through God’s Design for Gender, Marriage, and the Family”,told the New York Timesthat “what we’re trying to do is keep the conversation alive”.
The non-binding resolution also called for a defunding of Planned Parenthood, for “parental rights in education and healthcare”, and took in other issues vexing conservatives, including transgender women’s participation in women’s sports. The resolution called for “safety and fairness in female athletic competition”.
The resolution also criticized “willful childlessness”, while others called for banning pornography and condemnation of sports betting. Each resolution suggests that the Baptists are moving beyond generic support of “family values” toward specific cultural issues.
Denny Burk, president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, told the Times that the resolution “puts Southern Baptists on the record … We know that we’re in a minority in the culture right now, but we want to be a prophetic minority.”
Notably, the gathering in Dallas was overshadowed by the recent death of Jennifer Lyell, a former Christian publishing executive who became a whistleblower on the Southern Baptists’ scandal of sexual abuse.
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Lyell went public in 2019 with allegations that she had been sexually abused by David Sills, her seminary professor while she was a student. Lyell died on Saturday aged 47 after a series of “massive strokes”, according to Rachael Denhollander, an activist and lawyer who has represented her.
Lyell had been a Southern Baptist success story and joined the faith after attending, at 20, a Billy Graham crusade. She went to a seminary and became a vice-president at Lifeway, the Southern Baptist Convention’s publishing arm.
But her disclosures of alleged sexual and spiritual abuse by Sills, including allegations that he had coerced her into sexual acts without her consent, and then asked her to join him at family meals afterward, cast a dim light over the SBC.
Lyell claimed in a depositionthat after they had sex, Sills instructed her to clean her face and repent.
An attorney for Sills told theReligionNews Service that their client “denies and has always denied each and every allegation made by his accuser, including the content of the very limited deposition testimony released by counsel”.
The convention’s executive committee apologized in 2022,acknowledging“its failure to adequately listen, protect, and care for Jennifer Lyell when she came forward to share her story” and voted to create a way to track pastors and other church workers credibly accused of sex abuse.
Committee president Jeff Iorg said earlier this year that creating a database is not a focus and that the committee instead plans to refer churches to existing databases of sex offenders while focusing on education about abuse prevention.