What the hell has Tennessee legislature been up to lately? Have the Capitol’s water fountains been replaced by moonshine stills? Has Florida Georgia Line’s music finally cruised everyone to the insanity we knew was all but inevitably coming?
I’ll admit it, I began this article with a joke to ease you in. Because I’m about to talk about laws and discrimination, and those are anything but funny.
Ready? Here goes.
Tennessee legislators have passed three bills this month -- one to institute the Bible as the official state book, one to require what bathrooms transgender students can use and one to allow counselors to deny service to clients.
Let’s talk about that one.
Designated as HB 1840, this bill would legally enable counselors to deny service to any of their clients if that client’s goals, beliefs or outcomes contradict a “sincerely held religious belief” by that counselor.
Both the Senate and the House approved this bill on April 15 and “transmitted it to the Governor for action,” according to the Tennessee General Assembly’s website.
Supporters of the bill extol it as a protection to religious liberty, both as a cultural ideal and as a personal prerogative. The Family Action Council of Tennessee, a conservative, religiously-based political group, put it this way: “This is an important bill to safeguard a counselor or therapist’s religious beliefs and moral convictions.”
(Keep in mind that FACTN is associated with Focus on theFamily, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as a hate group.)
Those who oppose the bill see it as inherently discriminatory, particularly to at-risk minority groups such as the LGBT community, non-Christians and women -- to name a few -- to such an extent that the bill has been dubbed “Hate Bill 1840” or the “Counseling Discrimination Act.”
I fall squarely in this camp. It is discrimination. It is unethical. It is unjust. It is unChristlike.
It is wrong.
This bill attempts to solve a problem which doesn’t even exist in the first place. Counselors or therapist’s religious beliefs need to be safeguarded against what, exactly? Being made slightly uncomfortable by a client who may not believe exactly the same way they do?
Never mind the fact that counseling is a medical field, and to turn away someone seeking help constitutes malpractice, no exceptions. Imagine if an atheist surgeon didn’t operate on someone because the patient believed in God. That would cause an outrage.
As such, this bill -- which, if it gets signed into law, would be the only one of its kind in the entire country -- directly contradicts the codes of ethics of all major psychological and counseling organizations.
For example, as of 2014, The American Counseling Association’s Code of Ethics states that no counselor can discriminate on the bases of “age, religion/spirituality, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital/partnership status, language preference, socioeconomic status, immigration status, or any basis proscribed by law.”
This is because what needs to be safeguarded are not the counselors’ religious liberties, but the very people those counselors are required to treat. The fact they are seeking help inherently implies vulnerability.
Add to that a minority status like non-heterosexuality, and “vulnerable” becomes nothing short of “endangered.”
Most of the oppositional rhetoric swirling around this bill lambasts it as discriminatory and dangerous, particularly to members of the LGBT community. This is not by accident.
The LGBT community is at greater risk of suicide or mental illness, caused by a variety of factors which will not be delved into here.
LGBT youth, for example, are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual counterparts, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Mental illness among this community is not so much a threat as an imminent reality, which then logically suggests that LGBT people are more likely to seek help from a therapist.
Now imagine if an at-risk LGBT person, considering taking his or her own life, approaches a counselor and asks for assistance. If that counselor holds a religious belief that homosexuality is wrong, and if they hold it just sincerely enough (which, by the way, how do you measure that?), they can refer them to another counselor.
In other words, they can sincerely sign their death warrant.
More than one-third of all Tennessee residents live in rural areas where counselors, particularly affirming counselors, may be few and far between. Even if, as the bill requires, the first therapist refers the client to another, access to that referred practitioner may be impossible. And so treatment is never received.
Given the current climate of Southeastern legislature, in which Mississippi, Kansas, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee have proposed LGBT-related laws in the past month alone, it cannot be a coincidence that this bill, coming out alongside Tennessee’s transgender bathroom bill, does not have in its crosshairs LGBT people.
Don’t believe me? OK, then, take it from the source: one of the bill’s original sponsors.
Dan Howell, a Republican representative from Tennessee’s 22nd District, maintains an active Facebook presence. And, as it seems, a very reactive Christian faith.
Look at an article he shared on his personal Facebook page on April 13, two days before the bill passed.
Or this one, which he shared three times 
the day
before.
He paints LGBT people as radicals. He says we (meaning Christians, and if you don’t believe me, remember that Tennessee just tried to make the Bible its state book) are under attack.
And what do you do when you feel you are under attack? Well, if you ask this gun-toting legislator: you fight back.
Laws can be used as tools or brandished as weapons, and, in this case, I think the bill he sponsors bears more resemblance to that musket than it does anything else.
Look, counselor’s religious liberties are not threatened. Gay people are threatened. Transgender people are threatened. Religious minorities are threatened. People’s very lives are threatened. And, honestly, Christianity as it was meant to be practiced is threatened, as well.
There are right ways to practice religion, and then there are wrong ways. There’s good religion and bad religion, and this bill represents and defends a very bad way of doing religion.
If only we had a model for how to do that religion…some really wise, maybe even divine person to show us how to act… like, maybe, I don’t know, Jesus Christ?
Over and over again in Scripture, Jesus, upon healing people, commends them for their faith, going so far to say it was their faith that made them well. Many of these people were possessed by demons, a phrase some take to be a first-century way of describing what we now know to call mental illness.
So, I ask: what act is more faithful than a person A) struggling with mental illness, B) recognizing it as a problem, C) admitting they can’t tackle it on their own, D) seeking out help, and E) confessing to someone a deeply personal struggle with the hopes of being healed?
What is that if not faith? And if we are to be CHRISTians, to emulate Christ, then we are to heal them, no exceptions. Jesus did not discriminate. Jesus did not ask what their goals or outcomes were. Jesus did not turn people away. And neither should we.
This bill sits on the desk of Gov. Haslam, awaiting either a veto or an approval. A thumbs-up could prove to be devastating to some of Tennessee’s most marginalized people.
You can contact Gov. Haslam and voice your opposition at this number: (615)-741-2001.
Or sign a petition here.
Or, if you are so inclined, pray. Pray that discrimination not be written into law. Because discrimination, regardless of how it is packaged, is always, always wrong.
