When the Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear a challenge to Tennessee’s law protecting minors from gender transition procedures, a group of state lawmakers responded with prayer. “We got on a call yesterday and prayed yesterday for our AG [attorney general],” Tennessee Rep. Jason Zachary (R) said Tuesday on “Washington Watch.”
That God-focused approach has undergirded Tennessee’s entire strategy to protecting children, the state lawmaker noted. “I serve with some people who love the Lord, and this is a calling for us to serve in the state legislature,” said Zachary. “It’s easy to play the God card in the South … but man, Governor [Bill] Lee loves Jesus. Our majority leader, William Lamberth, is a [Christian].” Even “the predecessor to Governor Lee, Governor [Bill] Haslam, loved the Lord. He was a Christ follower.”
“It makes a difference when you’re working for an audience of One, and you’re not worried about what the blowback will be,” Zachary continued. “We tackle these tough social issues that some, even some red states, don’t like to tackle. … We recognize as believers the enemy is looking to ‘steal, kill, and destroy’ (John 10:10). And so we have to do all we can to take the necessary steps to protect our most vulnerable, because the enemy is always going to keep coming.”
A “somewhat unique” aspect of Tennessee’s SAFE Act “is that the leadership pushed this,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins noted. “The leadership was all in on this. … Governor Lee is doing a great job. Your Attorney General [Jonathan Skrmetti] says, ‘Hey, I welcome the fight. We will defend this.’ It sounds like everybody there in Tennessee is on board in protecting this law so that you can protect children.” Perkins added that this type of positive policy change is what “comes with godly leadership willing to step into the arena.’
The Tennessee consensus in favor of protecting children has been maturing for nearly a decade. “It goes back to my first term, when I was first elected in 2016,” when the pressing issue was to protect unborn children, said Zachary. “We began to take steps to protect life: 48-hour [waiting requirements for abortion], 20-week [pro-life protections], [requiring abortion businesses to maintain] admitting privileges [in local emergency rooms].”
With growing momentum came greater boldness. “Then we took the [next] step with the heartbeat bill,” Zachary continued. “And then, in 2019, we passed the Human Life Protection Act, which is now the strongest pro-life piece of legislation in the country, where we have effectively eliminated abortions in Tennessee — all elective abortions.”
Then came “this social contagion of gender dysphoria” that “has swept across the country over the last couple of years,” narrated Zachary. “When I was first elected, this wasn’t even a major issue, and it has become an issue over the last four or five years.”
So the Tennessee legislature leapt into action again. “We took the steps of protecting the integrity of girls’ restrooms, protecting the integrity of high school and collegiate sports,” Zachary explained. “And the next step was to protect minors … from irreversible procedures, [genital] mutilation procedures, and also these harmful drugs that they take [to] keep them from having children, to completely alter their voice, [to] completely change the dynamics and the genetics of the child.”
“Again, it was led by leadership,” Zachary noted. On the day after the November 2022 midterm elections, Tennessee House Majority Leader Lamberth (R) and Tennessee Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson (R) introduced the bill as SB 1 and HB 1, giving it pride of place on their list of 2023 priorities. “Our majority leader[s] picked up the mantle,” Zachary declared. “They really worked with our caucuses in both chambers to make sure we had the support, which we obviously did.”
“The only pushback that we got was from the most radical in the other party, our Democratic colleagues,” Zachary added. Even still, three Democrats joined Republicans in passing the bill “because, again, this is common sense.”
“As we continue to have these destructive and adversarial policies come out of Washington … conservative states have to continue to firewall ourselves and protect the people of our states from such destructive policies and these radical agendas,” insisted Zachary. He noted that 25 states — fully half of the country — have now acted to protect minors from gender transition procedures in a relatively short span of time.
“We’re winning on the issue of life in Tennessee. We’re winning now protecting children from these terrible, horrible procedures. And we’re just going to keep moving forward again because it’s the right thing to do,” Zachary said. “And because again, we’re working for an audience of one.”
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.
