A new Tennessee bill, which would allow mental health therapists to reject the patients, has been passed and is on its way to the governor. The mental health therapists would base their judgements on their religious beliefs and personal principles.
According to Yahoo! News, the American Counseling Association expressed that Tennessee would be the only state to permit counselors to turn down patients who need treatment if the bill is already signed into a new law. The organization also labelled the measure as an "unprecedented attack" on its profession. But the bill is just a part of a series of legislation across the United States.
ABC NEWS reported that the Senate passed the bill in February. The bill would allow counselors to turn away patients based on "sincerely held religious beliefs." Just last week, the House passed a version that would enable the mental health therapists to turn away patients based on the "sincerely held principles of the counselor or therapist."
But the measure will not permit the therapists to reject people who are in imminent danger of harming themselves or others. On Monday, the Senate agreed to modify the measure and dropped religious beliefs. Instead, the Senate added the broader language of principles.
Senator Jeff Yarbro claimed that the change "creates a lot of vagueness" in the legislation. The Nashville Democrat also stated that the issue of sincerely held religious beliefs has been the subject of legal cases these past years. He also called the idea of a sincerely held principle an "unheard-of concept" as a legal matter.
The Senator also said that if the bill becomes a law, the mental health therapists could have any reason not to provide their services, including race, religion, and gender. "There's lots different principles that come into play, and there's no limitation on what those principles are, other than it has to be 'sincerely held,'" Yarbro added.
The Tennessee Republican Governor, Bill Haslam, also revealed last week that he can "understand the reasoning" behind the new bill. However, he wanted to see the final version prior to jumping into conclusions and deciding whether to sign it into a law, as claimed by the Dailymail UK.
Meanwhile, the opponents of the measure claimed that the bill would legalize discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. However, the supporters say that it takes into account the rights to everyone.
