A group of religious conservatives listed nearly a dozen Bible passages in an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court Wednesday regarding a case about gender-affirming health care bans.
The high court is poised to rule this term on the question of whether a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for minors violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. It will likely carry major consequences for the transgender community nationwide.
In a 42-page brief, current and former members of 23 state legislatures argued in favor of the ban alongside the American Family Association, a Christian group that works against abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
Supreme Court briefings of this type typically cite relevant prior cases and statutes, along with other sources such as scientific papers or news articles. In a section marked “Other Authorities,” the group lists 11 passages from the “Holy Bible.” It does not specify any one version of the Bible.
Multiple passages describe the need to recognize the authority and ultimate power of God.
The group argues that the country’s founders urged Americans to live according to biblical teachings and that “with the help of the Holy Spirit, we can grow in faith and maturity and gain the self-control to live with greater obedience to divine law and legitimate governing authority.”
“Such views are consistent with our country’s history and tradition,” the brief says in a footnote.
The U.S. Department of Justice is challenging the Tennessee law, passed in 2023. It bans medical treatments that allow “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” and that treat “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.”
The law goes on to call gender-affirming care a type of “identity politics” that stands “fundamentally at odds with the original meaning of the Constitution and the biblical and classical tradition that influenced the Founders.”
The document is directly in line with claims by the conservative legal movement that there is no inherent guarantee of separation of church and state in the United States.
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