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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti
"God puts his people where he needs them," Jonathan Skrmetti said during the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti says it was God’s will for him to defend the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth before the U.S. Supreme Court.
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"I’m in the middle of things that are so much bigger than I have any business being in the middle of. But I’m there for a reason,” Skrmetti said Tuesday at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Dallas, The Tennessean reports. “So I just try to remember it’s not about me and that God puts his people where he needs them, where he wants them."
The AG defended the Tennessee law in December when the court heard U.S. v. Skrmetti, which has now reverted to its original name of L.W. v. Skrmetti. Three families with transgender children, along with one doctor, sued over the ban, which was signed into law by Republican Gov. Bill Lee in March 2023.
RELATED: What is U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court case that could change gender-affirming care forever?
The suit challenges the provisions of the law banning hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers for the purpose of gender transition for people under 18 and does not include the ban on surgery. Genital surgery is almost never performed on minors. Skrmetti, the Tennessee Department of Health, the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners, and various other state officials are the defendants.
The Supreme Court will issue a decision before its term ends this summer, which means the ruling could come any day.
Skrmetti spoke along with Ryan Bangert, senior vice president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-LGBTQ+ legal nonprofit that is assisting in the case. “I would be ready to have good conversations with your congregants, good conversations with your fellow church members about what this case means not just from a legal perspective. But from a broader cultural perspective,” Bangert said. “I would be ready to have that conversation: ’God willing, the law has been upheld. What do we do now?’”
RELATED: 7 takeaways from the Supreme Court hearing on Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for youth
The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission organized the panel with Skrmetti and Bangert. The commission had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the gender-affirming care case, making a religion-based argument in favor of the ban; the denomination has long opposed any affirmation of trans identity.
Skrmetti and Bangert couldn’t make a faith-based argument in the case because of separation of church and state, but Skrmetti praised the commission’s brief. He is not a Southern Baptist but is a member of another conservative denomination, the Church of Christ.
“Pray for my team that all of us that if we win, win gracefully in a way that reinforces both shining God’s light into the world,” Skrmetti said at the event.
