Christian At Center Of Supreme Court Transgender Case Has ‘This Sweet Spirit’
Like many lawyers, Jonathan Skrmetti always aspired to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. But, he says, he just never got around to applying.
Skrmetti, Tennessee’s attorney general, finally got his wish in early December when he raised his right hand at the historic Supreme Court building in Washington and was sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts.
For Skrmetti, the experience was a lot like a wedding.
“They tell you where to go, where to stand, when to stand, when to sit,” he said. “You get up, you say, ‘I do,’ and there’s always somebody directing you through it.”
And as soon as the ceremony was over, Skrmetti stepped forward and sat down in the fourth seat at the respondents’ table, and the arguments began.
The case? U.S. v. Skrmetti.
“It’s kind of funny to be up there and get sworn in when you’re the guy the case is against,” said Skrmetti, a member of the Harpeth Hills Church of Christ in Brentwood, Tennessee, south of Nashville.
As Tennessee’s chief lawyer, it’s Skrmetti’s job to defend the state against legal challenges to its statutes. And in U.S. v. Skrmetti, one of the Supreme Court’s most consequential cases this term, Skrmetti and his office are defending Tennessee Senate Bill 1, which prohibits the use of drugs or surgeries to alter a minor’s sex characteristics.
The Tennessee law, like those in several other states, essentially prevents medically assisted sex transitions for those under the age of 18 — no puberty blockers, no mastectomies, no other surgeries — if those medical treatments are intended to allow “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.”
The Biden administration teamed with the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge the Tennessee law on behalf of a group of Tennessee children seeking to transition. Their suit lost at the lower courts and was appealed to the U.S. high court last year. A decision is expected by June.
Just over two years into office, Skrmetti has been propelled into the forefront of a host of national controversies, not the least of which is the case before the high court that now bears his name. Many of those battles have garnered national attention and made him a go-to leader among other state attorneys general when taking on the federal government, international corporations or powerful tech companies.
The Church of Christ member seems like an unlikely champion of cultural causes or crusader for consumer protection. With round glasses and a genial smile, he looks more like an earnest-but-cautious tax accountant than a hard-charging general in the nation’s culture wars.
“He’s not a yeller. He’s not a rhetoric guy,” said Harpeth Hills executive minister Jason Thompson. “He interviews well on TV, but if you talk to him one on one as a friend — he’s just got this sweet spirit.”
Indeed, it was Skrmetti who made the rounds on national media in the days after the U.S. v. Skrmetti arguments, defending Tennessee nearly two dozen times at anchor desks with journalists across the spectrum — from CNN’s Jake Tapper to conservative political commentator Megyn Kelly.
“So I came out of the court, and we had a quick sandwich,” he said, “and then it was studio to studio to studio.”
Litigating through controversy
The Skrmetti case is ostensibly about whether SB1 violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment by discriminating based on sex. But it is also wrapped up in a larger and more combustible cultural conversation about the growing number of children and teens expressing gender dysphoria and whether drugs and surgeries are the best solution to help them.
The law permits the use of drugs and surgeries for minors when they align with the child’s sex, but it bans the same treatments if they are used to result in a minor living in a way that differs from their sex. For example, a boy can receive testosterone to treat delayed puberty, but a girl cannot receive testosterone to support a physical transition to live as a boy.
Chase B. Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU, argued against Tennessee at the Supreme Court in December. He said the “discriminatory nature” of the law means the state must show the law is narrowly tailored to advance a “compelling government interest,” and it hasn’t.
“SB1 has taken away the only treatment that relieved years of suffering for each of the adolescent plaintiffs,” Strangio told the court.
But Tennessee defended SB1 before the court as a valid regulation aimed at protecting minors from what the state views as experimental or potentially irreversible procedures. The law treats all minors equally, regardless of gender identity, the state argues. It simply prohibits certain medical interventions when used for a specific purpose: gender transition of children.
Beyond questions of constitutional interpretation, equal protection and compelling state interests is a skepticism over whether drugs and surgeries are even effective at alleviating gender dysphoria and reducing suicides. Under questioning by Justice Samuel Alito, Strangio acknowledged that recent studies have shown no conclusive statistical evidence demonstrating a reduction in suicides among children dealing with gender dysphoria.
“I thought that was the most important part of the argument,” Skrmetti told The Christian Chronicle. “You’ve seen a lot of parents almost bullied with the question, ‘Would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?’ or ‘Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?’ And the implication is if you don’t go along with this transition wholeheartedly, your child is going to kill himself. And that’s horrible.”
Jonathan Skrmetti poses for a photo at the attorney general’s office in Nashville. (Photo by Ted Parks)
A draw toward public service
Skrmetti’s road to become the Tennessee AG — and to his recent national attention — began in the small New England town of Mystic, Conn., where he was born and reared. His father was a nuclear engineer at the nearby naval submarine base. His mother was a public school teacher.
As a youth, he was bright — and politically attuned. His sharp intellect got him into George Washington University, where he earned a degree in philosophy. He went on to get another degree at the University of Oxford.
Skrmetti’s high GPA and test scores landed him at Harvard Law School. After graduating, he clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, a plum appointment for a young lawyer with political aspirations.
For six years after his clerkship, he worked in Washington in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. And he quickly took on several high-profile criminal prosecutions — including cases involving police misconduct, federal hate crimes and human trafficking.
“The first case they sent me out on after a six-month boot camp was to Memphis,” he said, “and there were these Memphis police officers who were robbing drug dealers and then reselling the drugs with their gang buddies.”
He prosecuted neo-Nazis who were conspiring to assassinate then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, and he sent to prison the leadership of a White supremacist gang that firebombed the Islamic Center of Columbia, Tennessee. He handled the prosecution of several child sex trafficking rings that were luring Mexican girls into the U.S. and forcing them into prostitution by using threats of violence.
By 2011, Skrmetti had spent more than five years commuting between Washington and Memphis, and he decided to apply for a DOJ opening in Tennessee.
“I was tired of airplanes. I was tired of Washington,” he said. “I was ready to settle down.”
But his role in Memphis retained its focus on prosecuting sex traffickers, corrupt officials and violent White supremacists. And that, Skrmetti said, took an emotional toll.
“With the trafficking work, there was just some really horrible stuff, I mean just evil, evil things that I learned about firsthand, talking to these women who had been horrifically wounded,” he said. “It was nothing compared to what they carry — but … it started to weigh more and more on me.”
That emotional impact — and a growing family — led Skrmetti to leave the DOJ for five years of private practice at a high-powered Memphis law firm. But public service soon called again, this time in state government. Tennessee’s attorney general was looking for a chief deputy to manage about 160 of the state’s attorneys across 15 divisions.
Not long after taking the job, Skrmetti played a pivotal role in negotiating a $26 billion multistate opioid settlement. Skrmetti represented Tennessee during negotiations with the nation’s major pharmaceutical distributors, and the resulting deal provided funds for opioid treatment, prevention and recovery programs for millions.
That work got the attention of Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, who asked Skrmetti in 2021 to become his chief counsel. But the next year, when Tennessee’s attorney general role came open, Skrmetti decided he was ready for the top job.
Forty-three states elect their AGs, and six are appointed by governors or legislators. But Tennessee’s is appointed to an eight-year term by the state Supreme Court — the only one “anointed,” Skrmetti jokes.
And when he got the job, he edged out five other candidates — a group that included a U.S. attorney, two former Tennessee state representatives and a former solicitor general. Of the contenders, he was the youngest.
That unusual structure is one reason Skrmetti, in just over two years, has spearheaded so many multistate efforts in conjunction with other state AGs.
“I don’t have to worry about fundraising,” he said, “and that just gives me the latitude to be as much of an AG as I want to be.”
Skrmetti is unquestionably conservative in his politics — he joined the College Republicans at George Washington and the Republican student group at Harvard. There, he edited the top right-leaning law review in the country. And he’s long been an active member of the limited-government Federalist Society.
But the wide swath of cases he’s pursued over the course of the past two and a half years run the gamut ideologically. To be sure, the transgender medical treatments case now before the court fractures observers along roughly party lines, as do some of the other cases he’s advanced, such as challenging the Biden administration’s redefinition of “sex” under Title IX and defending the state’s restrictions on minors at drag shows.
His prosecutorial work at times has drawn criticism from Democrats as politically motivated. But he’s also taken on TikTok, Instagram, Google and other Big Tech defendants for their abuse of customer data and their impact on the mental health of children. And he’s joined other attorneys general in seeking to combat the use of artificial intelligence and related technologies for creation of simulated pornography and child exploitation.
He became a folk hero among Tennessee Vols fans for launching antitrust litigation against the NCAA for its attempts to govern student athletes’ name, image and likeness rights, known as NIL.
And he endeared himself to a generation of Taylor Swift fans in 2022 by filing a monopoly-busting lawsuit against Ticketmaster after its online market for the musician’s Eras Tour cratered, resulting in an online retail debacle.
“We’re obviously not the only ones involved — it’s a big team effort,” he said. “But it was great to be able to say, ‘This is nonsense, it’s illegal, it’s time for it to stop.’”
A Super Bowl scheme and spiritual revival
About the time Skrmetti made the full-time transition from Washington to Memphis, he became the subject of a different type of conspiracy.
A fellow prosecutor in the Memphis DOJ office, Jennifer Webber, thought Skrmetti would be a perfect match for one of her friends at the White Station Church of Christ, and she also sensed his nascent desire for a deeper faith. So she invited him to attend the White Station young professionals’ Super Bowl party.
“Jennifer said, ‘Go to this party,’ and I had nothing better to do,” he said. “I expected everybody to be pretty strange. They were wonderful. They were incredible people.”
Skrmetti’s upbringing had not been irreligious, but it also wasn’t spiritually focused, he said. His father had been raised Catholic, and his mother was a Congregationalist.
“I was not the most religious child,” he said. “I went to church, but I was not transformed by it.”
Within a week of the Super Bowl party, he had visited the church and struck up a regular lunch meeting with senior minister Rodney Plunket. He also began studying with lead minister Bob Turner.
“Within about two minutes of walking into White Station, there was this physical sense of belonging and rightness,” he said. “I knew that’s where I was supposed to be.”
Three weeks later, Skrmetti was baptized.
He kept meeting twice a week with Plunket, who said Skrmetti was eager to understand Churches of Christ and wrestle with deep theological issues.
“We talked about all kinds of stuff — but heavy with Bible, theology, philosophy,” Plunket said. “He was one of the most delightful Bible theology conversation partners I’ve ever had — as rich as conversations I had in academia.”
Skrmetti also hit it off with the one of the church members Webber wanted him to meet, a Harding University graduate and physical therapist named Alisha Hassell. Within a year and a half, the two were married.
“Jennifer and the church ladies were scheming really hard to get the two of us together,” Skrmetti said, “and I needed all the help I could get.”
An ambitious humility and a focus on family
Skrmetti may be known nationally for the wide range of cases he’s pursued since becoming Tennessee’s attorney general, and his name is indelibly tied to the current Supreme Court case.
But what strikes those with whom he’s worshiped at two separate congregations over the past 14 years is an earnest humility.
“He is not what opponents would want to paint him out to be,” said Thompson, the Harpeth Hills minister. “He has been involved in all of these hot-button, controversial topics but in a nonconfrontational way — in a beautiful way.”
Turner, the Memphis minister, echoed that.
“I’ve never even seen him in a firm discussion,” Turner said. “He is literally one of the most congenial, joyful people I’ve ever known in my life. And yet, he’s been more aggressive in the cases they’ve taken on than his personality would necessarily suggest.”
They also say it’s clear his focus is on his family and his faith. He and wife, Alisha, now have four children — Sam, Sadie, Luke and Evelyn — whom she homeschools.
“I’m very fortunate to be married to an extraordinary woman,” Skrmetti said. “And with big cases and lots of work and me being in this suddenly pretty prominent position, she’s just rolled with it and holds the family together.”
Friends say Skrmetti, who launched into marriage and parenthood later than many people do, has pursued both with an unparallelled intentionality. For example, when he interviewed for attorney general with the Tennessee Supreme Court, he took son Sam, 9 at the time, with him to the chambers for the all-day hearing. Before grilling Skrmetti with policy questions, Justice Holly Kirby asked whether he needed his “co-counsel” with him at the podium.
“Your honor, may I reserve the right to ask for backup if it gets too hairy up here?” he joked at the time.
And Thompson said he believes that’s why Skrmetti has jumped so deeply into church involvement since his move to Tennessee and his baptism.
“They’re there every Wednesday night, every Sunday morning. They’re part of a small group. They’re very engaged in the church culture,” he said. “He sees his children being nurtured in the faith, and he puts his children first and his wife first.”
Skrmetti said that’s true, but it’s not the whole story. He’s just as stimulated by the opportunity to study alongside people who have a deep understanding of Scripture, including Rubel Shelly, former president of Rochester Christian University in Michigan, and Leonard Allen, dean of the College of Bible and Ministry at Lipscomb University in Nashville.
And when describing his faith, Skrmetti recounts the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard from Matthew 20.
“It’s like being in grad school,” he said. “You get these brilliant, brilliant teachers who are very serious and very rigorous, and you’re alongside people you love who are trying to understand alongside you. And I really enjoy it.
“I got kind of a late start,” he said. “You don’t have to feel bad for showing up late. But I feel like there’s so much that I didn’t have a chance to learn that other people have. And so, I really value that opportunity.”
This piece is republished from The Christian Chronicle with permission.
Kenneth Pybus is a professor of journalism and mass communication at Abilene Christian University and a First Amendment attorney. Reach him at kenneth.pybus@acu.edu.