At their national meeting yesterday, Southern Baptist delegates overwhelmingly endorsed a resolution calling for the outright reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
This marks a significant and assertive step for the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, which has consistently defined marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman.
The resolution, approved by over 10,000 church representatives, explicitly calls for “overturning of laws and court rulings, including Obergefell v. Hodges, that defy God’s design for marriage and family.” It further states an affirmative desire for “laws that affirm marriage between one man and one women.”
While overturning Obergefell alone wouldn’t automatically ban same-sex marriage in states that had already legalized it, the Southern Baptist Convention’s broader aspiration is to invalidate “every law and court ruling that affirmed same-sex marriage.” The resolution passed without debate, underscoring the deeply conservative stance on this issue within the denomination.
The call to reverse Obergefell and dismantle other legal foundations for same-sex marriage was embedded within a larger resolution on marriage and family, advocating for civil law to reflect a “divinely created order” based on biblical interpretation.
This also includes demands for recognizing “the biological reality of male and female” and opposing policies that “compel people to speak falsehoods about sex and gender.”
