Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed former Tennessee Senator David Fowler to the newsmaker line to go into further details regarding the marital consent bill.
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Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed the former state Senator and President of FACT, David Fowler to discuss the legal implications of Governor Lee’s mask executive order.
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When Governor Lee’s COVID-19 Executive Order first ordered certain businesses to close, I looked up the law on which he relied and saw it passed while I was still in the state Senate. My heart sank on the assumption I probably voted for it. However, this week’s Executive Order delegating authority to county mayors to require county residents to wear facemasks or face state criminal sanctions sent me to the Tennessee Code to see if I’d really voted for a law that would allow that. I did not, and it is time we tell our state legislators to put an end to law by executive branch fiat.
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Through a 38-minute video and a separate blog post, the uniqueness of the Heartbeat Bill that the state Senate Judiciary Committee will consider in its Summer Study has been explained in great detail the Family Action Council of Tennessee (FACT).
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A motion was filed Monday in the Chancery Court in Williamson County asking the court to set aside its earlier judgment dismissing the claims of five Williamson County residents who say Tennessee should not issue marriage licenses until a new statute is passed. The Motion for Relief from Judgment asks the court to set aside its earlier judgment on June 14, 2016, dismissing the claims of five Williamson County residents related to the administration of Tennessee’s marriage licensing statutes by the Williamson County clerk following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. Former State Sen. David Fowler said in a press release that he filed the motion as attorney for the Constitutional Government Defense Fund, the legal arm of the Family Action Council of Tennessee (FACT). At least three of the plaintiffs are ministers at Middle Tennessee churches who say that Obergefell means Tennessee should not issue marriage licenses until a new statute is passed, according to Courthouse News Service. George Grant, Larry Tomczak and Lyndon Allen filed a lawsuit on Jan. 21, 2016 against Elaine Anderson, clerk of Williamson County. The other plaintiffs are Lyndon Allen and Tim McCorkle. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision overturned…
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by David Fowler Have public schools run their course? Just asking that question will irritate a lot of people, Christians included. But I think we have to ask the question, given an announcement last week by the Nashville Chamber of Commerce relative to what it wants from public education. Those who don’t ask and answer the question may not like what becomes of their children as adults. Last week the headline to a front-page story in The Tennessean said the Nashville Chamber of Commerce “wants to focus on social emotional learning.” Of course, the Haslam administration has been dabbling in developing content for social emotional learning for the last few years in-between toothless barks from some legislators. But what is it? Here’s how The Tennessean described it and the Nashville Chamber’s push for it: Framed by the question of what students need to be successful in the classroom, the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce in its annual education report card is throwing its collective influence behind a growing push for schools to provide students with social emotional learning. SEL, as it is known, is a method to teach students the skills to regulate emotions and to provide them with…
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The Family Action Council of Tennessee (FACT) has joined 32 other family policy councils nationwide in filing a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a Colorado baker accused of discrimination for declining to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the major, closely-watched case involving Jack Phillips and his family business, Masterpiece Cakeshop. The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that a state law could force Phillips to create a custom cake that conveys a message contrary to what he believes as a Christian. Phillips and his attorneys petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMn3WycWJsg The amicus brief was drafted by David French, an attorney and senior writer for National Review who lives in Columbia, about 45 miles south of Nashville. In a letter to supporters, David Fowler, the president of FACT, said joining the amicus brief is in keeping with “our mission to defend free speech and religious liberty.” The Supreme Court has received at least 45 friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the baker. The support comes from 479 creative professionals, 20 states including Tennessee, and 86 members of Congress, all Republicans. A variety of legal experts, civil rights advocates and…
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Family Action Council of Tennessee (FACT) will hold a half-day seminar this fall on cultivating a biblical worldview. The “Restoring the Vision” seminar on Saturday morning, November 11 at the Nashville School of Law will address such questions as, “What is the point of being a Christian? What are we are ‘saved’ for? Is Christianity about more than piety in this life and heaven later?” David Fowler, president of FACT, said on the group’s website that he wrestled with these questions when he reached a crisis point in his life in his 30s. At the time, he was going through the everyday motions of practicing law, thinking about Christianity in mostly an insular way as something that compels us simply to live a moral life and hope for God’s blessings while waiting to go to heaven. The answers he discovered to his questions changed the direction of his life. During the seminar, Fowler will share passages from throughout the Bible that will drive home his points in a comprehensive way. “But these foundational biblical truths aren’t ‘new’ or ‘newly discovered.’ They provided a vision for Christendom that transformed cultures and birthed Western Civilization, a vision that has largely faded within…
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The conservative Family Action Council of Tennessee (FACT) praised President Trump on Wednesday for saying that transgenders would not be allowed in the military, a reversal of a policy set in motion by former President Obama, who lifted a previous ban. David Fowler, president of FACT, said in a statement that “the military is not suited for social experimentation.” Obama had set a deadline of July 1 for fully implementing his policy, but Trump’s defense secretary had announced a six-month delay in enlisting transgender people. However, those already enlisted were allowed to transition and soldiers had started to undergo sensitivity training on welcoming soldiers of the opposite biological sex in barracks, bathrooms and showers. In a series of tweets Wednesday, Trump said that after consulting with generals and military experts, he decided that the U.S. government “will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military” so that the armed forces will not “be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.” Fowler’s full statement said: President Trump has kept a campaign promise to make military preparedness the focus of our military, and I commend him for doing…
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled that Arkansas must put the names of same-sex couples on children’s birth certificates, a decision David Fowler, president of the Family Action Council of Tennessee, said reflects the high court “again eroding the rights of the states.” Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. The decision reversed an Arkansas Supreme Court ruling that upheld a state law defining the other spouse as the woman’s husband and presumed father. Alabama’s highest court had said “it does not violate equal protection to acknowledge basic biological truths.” The plaintiffs in the case before the U.S. Supreme Court were two married lesbian couples who had children through anonymous sperm donation. One woman in each couple gave birth and wanted her partner to be listed as her spouse, but the state would only issue certificates with the birth mother’s name. The presumption of motherhood for lesbian partners is “irrational, illogical and impossible,” Fowler told The Tennessee Star. Fowler said that when the high court moved to “deconstruct marriage” in a 2015 ruling that struck down state bans on same-sex marriage, it “started the process of deconstructing the family as a whole.” Birth…
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The Family Action Council of Tennessee is calling President Trump’s signing of a religious liberty executive order on Thursday “a good first step.” But more is needed to shore up protections for people of faith, said FACT President David Fowler in a statement. Fowler said the executive order “addresses in a limited way the Johnson Amendment that has been used by the IRS to intimidate conservative ministers, but we call on the president to provide the leadership Congress needs to repeal it.” “We also join others in calling on the president to now take those additional steps necessary to fulfill the promise made during his campaign to fully protect religious liberty, particularly the liberty of those who believe in the sanctity of life and marriage,” Fowler said. Trump received widespread support from evangelicals in the November 2016 election and many have followed this issue closely to make sure he follows through on his campaign promise. In February, FACT joined with the Family Policy Alliance and its network of 40 state-based family policy councils in sending a letter to Trump asking him to reverse the tone set by the Obama administration. “We write to request that you firmly reject the systemic bullying…
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David Fowler of the Family Action Council of Tennessee has waded into the gas tax debate, writing in a blog post last week that while the issue is outside the focus of his group, it is “just too interesting to let slide.” “To appreciate what’s going on, you need to understand that the state House has always had a top-down management style,” wrote Fowler, who served in the state Senate for 12 years before joining FACT as president in 2006. “It works sort of like this,” Fowler wrote. “The Speakers typically give the rank-and-file Representatives (hereafter, the ‘Little Guys’) the freedom to represent their folks back home, so long as their views on something important don’t conflict with that of the Speaker or the Governor, to whom the Speakers for some reason seem to always take some kind of fealty oath. But when there is a conflict, the Speaker uses the loyalty of his or her committee and subcommittee chairs, engendered by their being given a position of ‘importance,’ to bring down the hammer and get the ‘preferred’ agenda rammed through.” Fowler applauds the “Little Guys” who won’t “shut up and go along” with the gas tax, part of Gov.…
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David Fowler, president of the Family Action Council of Tennessee, is making a unique comparison between the recent defeat for religious liberty in an LGBT case in Washington state and a case more than 100 years ago in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law punishing polygamy. In both cases, courts upheld an underlying moral code, Fowler says. The difference between then and now is that the moral code has changed “What has changed – and it explains why polygamy could be banned in 1879 and why it will not be able to be banned in the coming years – is the religious beliefs that informed our laws back then. We no longer believe that God has imposed any laws on the social order that all must recognize, including those who make our civil laws,” Fowler wrote in his blog. In 1879 in Reynolds v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against George Reynolds, a Mormon and resident of Utah territory who argued that marrying more than one woman was integral to his religious faith. The high court said that allowing it would make an individual’s religious belief superior to the law of the land. Last month, the…
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