BOISE, Idaho (LifeSiteNews) — Idaho Republican lawmakers took a strong stand against homosexual “marriage,” voting to reject the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling as “an illegitimate overreach” and urge the court to overturn it.
The Idaho House of Representatives passed a resolution on Tuesday condemning the 2015 decision for “arbitrarily and unjustly” subverting the true definition of marriage, which “has been recognized as the union of one man and one woman for more than 2,000 years.”
The resolution – House Joint Memorial 17 – declares that “the Idaho Legislature rejects the Obergefell decision” and “calls upon the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse Obergefell and restore the natural definition of marriage.”
Obergefell is “is at odds with the Constitution of the United States and the principles upon which the United States is established” and has damaged the country’s “constitutional order,” the measure adds.
It notes that marriage is “‘an area that has long been regarded as a virtually exclusive province of the States,’ meaning that Idaho, and not the Supreme Court, has the right to regulate marriage for its citizens.”
The resolution further points out that 63 percent of Idaho voters approved Amendment 2 in 2006, which defines marriage in the state constitution as between one man and one woman.
It also states that “the Obergefell decision may have been illegitimately adjudicated because two justices in the majority ruling, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, had previously officiated same-sex weddings, and thus were not impartial triers of act and should have recused themselves” according to federal law.
Rep. Tony Wisniewski presented HJM 17, urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges and return to the traditional definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. HJM17 passed the House 44-26 and moves to the Senate. pic.twitter.com/oxllXWH4Fw
— Idaho Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucusID) March 10, 2026
Republican Rep. Tony Wisniewski, who sponsored the memorial, said that the lawmakers who voted for it oppose “the debasing of the term of marriage to that of something that is abhorrent to many of us.”
HJM 17 passed in a 44-26 vote, with a minority of Republicans joining all Democrats against the resolution. It now moves to the state Senate.
The Idaho House approved a similar resolution last year, though the Senate did not take it up.
Passage of the HJM 17 by Idaho House lawmakers comes a few weeks after Tennessee’s House of Representatives passed a bill that directly challenges homosexual “marriage.” That legislation – House Bill 1473 – would exempt banks, medical institutions, and other private entities from recognizing what the bill describes as “a purported marriage between individuals of the same sex.”
The measures come as backlash grows against homosexuality and the LGBT movement in the U.S., with support for homosexual “marriage” declining significantly among Republican voters and the American public, according to polling.
Homosexuality also radically contradicts Christian values, which most Idahoans profess and on which the U.S. was founded. The Bible condemns homosexuality as an “abomination” (Lev 18:22), a mortal sin (1 Cor 6:9-10), and a sin that cries out to Heaven for vengeance (Gen 18:20, 19:13), among other things.
The Catholic Church teaches that homosexual activity is gravely sinful and “intrinsically disordered” and that legislation attempting to equate homosexual unions with marriage is “gravely unjust.”
“There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family,” the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith taught in a 2003 document approved by Pope St. John Paul II.
Raising children in a homosexual household, deprived of a mother or a father, “would actually mean doing violence to these children,” stresses the document, which was issued by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI.
Indeed, homosexual “marriage” is particularly harmful to children, as demonstrated by several cases in the last few years alone of homosexuals arrested for abusing adopted children, trying to obtain children to abuse them, or otherwise committing child abuse.
