Southern Baptists Vote Against Gay Marriage

Southern Baptist delegates at their national meeting overwhelmingly endorsed a ban on same-sex marriage—including a call for a reversal of the US Supreme Court's 10-year-old precedent legalizing it nationwide. They also called for legislators to curtail sports betting and pornography, and to support policies that promote childbearing, decrying those who choose "willful childlessness." The votes Tuesday came at the gathering of more than 10,000 church representatives at the annual meeting of the nation's largest Protestant denomination, the AP reports.

The wide-ranging resolution doesn't use the word "ban," but it left no room for legal same-sex marriage in calling for the "overturning of laws and court rulings, including Obergefell v. Hodges, that defy God's design for marriage and family." Further, the resolution affirmatively calls "for laws that affirm marriage between one man and one women." A reversal of the Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell decision wouldn't in and of itself amount to a nationwide ban. At the time of that ruling, 36 states had already legalized same-sex marriage, and support remains strong in many areas. However, if the convention got its wish, not only would Obergefell be overturned, but so would every law and court ruling that affirmed same-sex marriage.

The marriage issue was incorporated into a much larger resolution on marriage and family—one that calls for civil law to be based on what the convention says is the divinely created order as stated in the Bible. The resolution says legislators have a duty to "pass laws that reflect the truth of creation and natural law—about marriage, sex, human life, and family" and to oppose laws contradicting "what God has made plain through nature and Scripture." The same resolution calls for recognizing "the biological reality of male and female" and opposes "any law or policy that compels people to speak falsehoods about sex and gender" and calls for "for renewed moral clarity in public discourse regarding the crisis of declining fertility and for policies that support the bearing and raising of children within intact, married families." (More same-sex marriage stories.)