Tennessee DA Won’t Enforce Domestic Violence Laws For Same-Sex Couples: There’s No Marriage To Protect

NBC News reports:

Craig Northcott, a district attorney in Tennessee’s Coffee County, a rural county between Nashville and Chattanooga, is facing calls to resign for saying he would not enforce domestic violence laws for people in same-sex marriages because he does not believe in same-sex marriage.

Northcott said he concluded, based on his own analysis and not on the fact that domestic violence charges also apply for unmarried couples, that “the reason that there’s enhanced punishment on domestic violence is to recognize and protect the sanctity of marriage. And I said, ‘there’s no marriage to protect.’ So I don’t prosecute them as domestics.”

Chris Sanders, executive director of statewide LGBTQ group Tennessee Equality, encouraged Northcott to step down. “He should explore resigning from office at this point, because he has expressed very clearly that he will not apply the law equally, and we think that’s his duty,” Sanders said.

As you’ll see in the clip, Northcott bases his refusal on his being a “good Christian man.”