Tennessee County Reverses Gay Ban
The
Advocate, March 20, 2004
Commissioners in rural, conservative Rhea County, Tenn.,
never intended to create the “wildfire” of reaction that resulted from a
motion to bar gay people, the county attorney said after the board reversed
its two-day-old decision. The original vote was meant to show support for the
state’s ban on same-sex marriages, county attorney Gary Fritts said
Thursday. “They wanted to send a message to our [state] representative and
senator that Rhea County supports the ban on same-sex marriage. Same-sex
marriage is what it was all about,” Fritts said. “There has just been so
much misunderstanding about this. It was to stop people from coming here and
getting married and living in Rhea County.”
The board voted 8-0 on Thursday to rescind its Tuesday
action. The commissioners declined to comment as deputies escorted them to and
from the meeting, where they overturned the earlier vote and quickly
adjourned. Fritts said he advised the commissioners that they could not bar
gays and lesbians from Rhea County or make them subject to criminal charges.
The U.S. Supreme Court last year struck down laws regarding same-sex sodomy as
a violation of adults’ constitutional right to privacy.
Commissioner J.C. Fugate, who initiated the Tuesday
motion, also made the motion to rescind it Thursday. In a discussion about
gays and same-sex marriage at the earlier meeting, Fugate had asked the county
attorney to find a way to “keep them out of here.” Twelve-year-old Caitlin
Kinney, part of a noisy crowd at the courthouse Thursday night, was
disappointed by the reversal. The seventh-grader said she doesn’t want
homosexuals in the community. “It’s not a Christian thing,” said Kinney,
identifying herself as a Baptist.
“I’ve never seen nothing like this,” Fritts said at
the Rhea County courthouse, where a jury 79 years ago convicted John Scopes
for teaching evolution.
During the Thursday meeting, social worker Esther
Jackson, 24, held up a sign reading, “Breed Love, Not Hate.” “I’m just
making a statement that I don’t think it’s right,” Jackson said of the
Tuesday vote. “It’s just ignorance, is all.”
Rhea County, which is located about 35 miles north of
Chattanooga, annually commemorates the 1925 trial at which Scopes, a high
school teacher, was convicted of teaching evolution. The verdict was reversed
on a technicality, and the trial became the subject of the play and movie
Inherit the Wind. In 2002 a federal judge struck down the teaching of a Bible
class in Rhea County’s public schools. Fritts said he doesn’t believe the
issue will come up again with the commissioners. “I think they got all the
publicity they need about it,” he said.
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