Gov. Haslam may sign bill denounced by LGBT advocates

NASHVILLE — Gov. Bill Haslam on Monday indicated he’s likely to sign a controversial bill that LGBT advocates charge is designed to cause problems for same-sex couples in areas ranging from marriage to child custody.

“We still haven’t gotten the bill,” Haslam told reporters earlier Monday in Lebanon after a school event. “As we always do, we wait until we get the final version of the bill to see.”

But Haslam added, “We’ve been deferred to the will of the Legislature all along. The bill passed fairly overwhelmingly, I think like three to one in both [chambers].”

The governor will have Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery and his own legal counsel review the bill’s final language.

Senators took final action on the bill last week. It instructs Tennessee courts to use the “natural and ordinary meaning” of undefined words in state law. A similar bill that’s going nowhere in the Legislature cited words like “husband,” “wife,” “mother” and “father.”

Such legislation has been pushed by Family Action Council President David Fowler, an attorney and former Republican senator who represented Signal Mountain.

Fowler, who has blasted the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 same-sex marriage ruling, has sought to push the issue back into the courts in hopes of getting the Supreme Court to revisit the ruling.

Haslam also noted that “if you look back to how the Tennessee Supreme Court has defined, used that term, the ordinary and natural meaning, and the United States Supreme Court, that’s a term that has been used for centuries, that words have their ordinary and natural meaning.

“So I’m not certain there’s any new ground here,” he said.

The Tennessee Equality Project has warned Tennessee could face an economic boycott over the legislation should it become law.

Contact Andy Sher at asher @timesfreepress.com or 615255-0550. Follow him on Twitter @AndySher1.