Even though the legislature in Texas is coming down to the wire, traditional and conservative values groups are trying very hard to get state regulations to negate what is most probably going to be a Supreme Court ruling coming out next month. This will force the state of Texas to at least recognize any gay marriage conducted outside the state if not allow them to be conducted within state as well.
There are a couple of measures which are being pushed here. One of the measures is that churches or pastors will not have to participate in gay marriages as long as it violates their religious beliefs as a community. The other measure is trying to prevent any tax money from being used for issuing licenses to same sex marriages.
As per Traditional Values member Jonathan Saenz, this problem only broke out when gay marriage crusaders took it upon themselves to protest against florists or bakeries that refused to serve gay couples and even threatened punitive action against them for not selling their cakes or flowers for gay events. He further added that there were multiple activist judges that weren’t helping the cause either. He also said that the state was eventually going to start fighting back and now they have.
But the Texas Freedom Network’s Dan Quinn says that every Texan needs to learn to respect the law as the courts interpret it and he said that what the conservatives are doing is going to do nothing but show Texas in bad light throughout the country. The truth is, this clergy exemption measure is basically a watered down version of an earlier law which allowed any business to refuse to work with gays or participate in any gay themed events. This was then quietly dropped since many conservative allied groups argued that this was going to put businesses at a huge disadvantage. He believes that this is nothing more than a legislative temper tantrum and that might just be the case.
This bill, called House Bill 4105 is going to prohibit any local or state tax money from being paid for same-sex marriages. It will also ban government employees in Texas from issuing same-sex marriage licenses or recognizing marriages legally performed in other states. There are 78 Republican co-authors for the bill which is more than 50% pf the 150 member House. But with more than 400,000 gay couples tying the knot every year, the chances of this bill actually passing are pretty slim.
