Religious-Liberty Laws That Have No Meaning

Tennessee is just the latest state to pass legislation claiming to protect conservatives who object to LGBT relationships and identity.

JONATHAN MERRITT 7:00 AM ET

An overwhelming three-fourths of Americans identify as religious. Listening to some religious conservatives in the U.S., though, one might think believers were a persecuted minority on the verge of extinction. In the name of protecting the sincerely held beliefs of religious Americans, conservative lawmakers and lobbyists have introduced a spate of controversial religious-freedom legislation in recent months. But apparently Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig aren’t the only ones fighting ghosts in 2016. The problems these bills claim to solve don’t actually exist.

In Tennessee, conservative legislators just passed a bill allowing counselors to refuse to provide mental-health services to patients if it would violate their “sincerely held religious belief,” which Governor Bill Haslam signed into law on Wednesday. The legislation was promoted by the Family Action Council of Tennessee, a conservative organization whose president once decried the American Psychiatry Association’s decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Opponents of the bill claim it allows discrimination against LGBT patients, particularly in rural areas where mental-health care is not widely accessible, but conservatives claim counselors’ freedom to live according to their convictions is at risk.

The bill is bold—it provides an explicit religious exemption for mental-health professionals who object to LGBT relationships and identity. But it’s unclear what has motivated it. In interviews, several Christian counselors across Tennessee and the heads of two national Christian counseling organizations said they didn’t know of any mental-health providers who felt their religious liberty was at stake.

“I do not personally know any counselor who will not see a gay person,” said Evon Flesberg, a pastoral therapist in Brentwood, Tennessee, and a counseling professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School. “I think this is the legislature trying to make a point rather than solve a problem.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/religious-liberty-laws-that-have-no-meaning/480297/