Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee ® signed a bill Wednesday allowing public officials to refuse to perform same-sex marriages.
State lawmakers approved Tennessee House Bill 878 last week. The legislation states people “shall not be required to solemnize a marriage” if they refuse to doing so based on their “conscience or religious beliefs.” According to the Tennessee Legislature website, the governor signed the bill Wednesday.
Look around you. Look at Alabama, at Texas, at Louisiana, at the ‘Freedom’ caucus in the House, at consistent efforts to eliminate bodily autonomy for women, and roll back women’s rights, and how those efforts are succeeding. Look at the way conservative states are limiting access to factual educational materials for children (and adults!) in public libraries, and they way that they’re trying to limit speech online.
We’re not far from regressing back to a point where women were property. We are dangerously close.
No, we’re not.
There have been recent challenges to freedom of speech, bodily autonomy, and privacy, along with other developments that both of us disagree with and find to be dangerous. But there is a vast distance between where we currently are and a society in which women are considered property. Women hold roughly 30% of public offices (varying between about 25% and 35% depending on type of office), are about 20% of the US military, and as I said before, fill almost half the working and management positions in the country.
It is not possible to make women property or force them to be subservient at scale. They may not be equally represented everywhere, and there is certainly room for improvement, but they hold too much power for this to happen.