In what appeared to be a unanimous vote, the Southern Baptist Convention approved a resolution on June 10 that rejected transgender individuals and called for overturning the 2015 US Supreme Court decision that required states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
“Legal rulings like Obergefell v. Hodges and policies that deny the biological reality of male and female are legal fictions, undermine the truth of God’s design, and lead to social confusion and injustice,” reads a portion of the “On Restoring Moral Clarity through God’s Design for Gender, Marriage, and the Family,” which was first published by the Baptist News. It was one of eight resolutions approved at the SBC’s annual conference at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center in Dallas.
The resolution also opposes healthcare for transgender children and teenagers and seeks to bar them from sports. It wants Planned Parenthood defunded and commercial surrogacy banned.
Another resolution calls for banning drugs that are used to induce an abortion. These have been proven to be safe and effective, having been used for decades. They are now the most common way of having an abortion. Other resolutions want to ban pornography and sports gambling.
One resolution repeats the lie that conservative Christians are seeing their religious liberty being restrained in the US. The reality is that conservative evangelicals and Roman Catholics are using federal lawsuits brought by right wing legal groups, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, that would allow them to refuse to hire or serve LGBTQ people, and also Jews, Muslims, atheists, and others who do not share their religious ideology. Currently, three federal lawsuits brought by right wing Christian counselors seek to overturn state laws that bar any counselor from using conversion therapy on minors. Conversion therapy does not work and can cause harm.
The resolution was written by Andrew Walker, a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He posted a link to a New York Times story previewing the resolution on X, formerly Twitter, that read “@nytimes reports on the upcoming resolution at #SBC25, ‘On Restoring Moral Clarity through God’s Design for Gender, Marriage, and the Family.’ Thanks to Elizabeth Dias for fair coverage.” Elizabeth Dias wrote the June 8 Times story on the upcoming vote.
In the discussion prior to the June 10 vote, Walker said that “Every proposed resolution was read carefully,” “discussed seriously,” and “marked by Christian charity.” One member of the convention wanted to add language to the resolution that called for amending the US Constitution and all state constitutions to bar same-sex couples from marrying. That amendment was rejected. Another member asked for language that would explicitly bar trans boys and men people from sports.
“This problem of transgenderism is also destructive to boys and men,” that man said on the livestream. “The committee will accept this as a friendly amendment,” Walker said.
The SBC counted votes only for elections. For the resolutions, members held up yellow ballots to vote yes or no. It appeared that no ballots were held up when Clint Pressley asked for those opposed. There were roughly 10,000 SBC members attending the meeting.
While same-sex marriage continues to be supported by a majority of Americans, the SBC’s goal is to get to the US Supreme Court to have Obergefell overturned, so ultimately their audience consists of the nine justices on the court. In the Obergefell decisions, four justices — Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and John Roberts, the chief justice — dissented. Scalia died in 2016. Six of the current nine justices are Roman Catholic and they have been generally sympathetic to religious liberty claims in cases before them.
The SBC continues to present itself as a moral guidepost in America despite its lengthy history of racism, misogyny, and more recently its worship of Donald Trump and its protection of pedophiles and rapists in its ranks. The SBC has a long history of vilifying members of the LGBTQ community. The SBC expels churches that affirm LGBTQ members and allow women to hold leadership position.
The group was founded in 1845 as the result of a schism among the Baptists over the morality of slavery. It defended slavery, which was uniquely violent and brutal in America, until it was abolished in 1865 by the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution. The SBC supported segregation until that practice was mostly ended in the mid-20th century, though that effort is not complete. It continues to deny women leadership positions in the denomination. In 2022, the SBC released a list of hundreds of pastors and other church personnel who had sexually assaulted children or women.
