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The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., approved a resolution calling for same-sex marriage and transgender civil rights protections to be repealed during its annual conference this week, amid the ongoing fallout of a far-ranging sex abuse scandal.
More than 10,000 church representatives attended the SBC’s annual convention this year in Dallas, Texas, as CNN reported. On Tuesday, attendees voted on a slate of non-binding resolutionsand “overwhelmingly” voted to approve one in particular titled “On Restoring Moral Clarity through God’s Design for Gender, Marriage, and the Family.” The resolution calls on lawmakers “to pass laws that reflect the truth of creation and natural law — about marriage, sex, human life, and family,” and specifically calls for Obergefell v. Hodgesthe Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage across the U.S. 10 years ago, to be overturned.
“[W]e call for the overturning of laws and court rulings, including Obergefell v. Hodgesthat defy God’s design for marriage and family,” the resolution read in part. The SBC resolution also condemned what it referred to as “willful childlessness,” and took aim as well at “transgender ideology” and “gender confusion,” which its authors claimed “represents a rebellion against God’s design for male and female.” Another clause of the resolution called for “the complete and permanent defunding of Planned Parenthood,” with any federal funds currently set aside for Planned Parenthood to be “directed to life-affirming healthcare providers” — a euphemism for religious healthcare providers who are anti-abortion.
“We know that we’re in a minority in the culture right now, but we want to be a prophetic minority,” Denny Burk, president of the evangelical group Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, told the New York Times this week. (Resolutions like these do not represent a binding church policy, but are rather “intended to strengthen our churches in conviction” and “provide clarity to policymakers […] about where we stand,” Committee on Resolutions chairman Andrew Walker told Baptist Press ahead of last year’s SBC conference.)
Conservatives in the U.S. have worked to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges almost since the case was first decided in 2015, and have escalated those efforts significantly in recent years, despite overwhelming public support for same-sex marriage rights. Key to that campaign has been the fight against trans civil rights, which right-wing evangelicals identified as a political wedge issue to divide the LGBTQ+ movement. Things came to a head after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, a decision that portended Obergefell could be next on the chopping block.
Since then, Republicans have lobbied the Court to finish the job, and even introduced resolutions of their own calling for gay marriage to be banned in some states. Amid President Donald Trump’s second term, some LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. have rushed to get married in case such unions are later banned — though legal experts have said that is still unlikelyin part due to the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act. In the meantime, Republicans have continued to scapegoat trans people, with Trump claiming that trans civil rights issues have “ripped apart our country” in comments to Time magazine in December.
This year’s SBC conference took place amid ongoing fallout over the church’s latest sex abuse scandal. Whistleblower and abuse victim Jennifer Lyell, a former Baptist publishing executive who accused former seminary professor David Sills of serial sexual abuse in 2019, died suddenly on June 7 after suffering multiple strokes. An independent report in 2022 found that SBC had regularly ignored sexual abuse allegations like Lyell’s for 20 years. At this week’s conference, SBC’s Executive Committee confirmed they would take out a $3 million loan to help pay for ongoing legal fees due to sex abuse claims against Sills and others; the organization had already moved to sell its Nashville, Tennessee headquarters last year, but that sale would not go through in time to pay the mounting bills, President Jeff Iorg told AL.com.
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