Tennessee’s “Nuclear Family Month” Is No Celebration
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee recently signed a resolution designating June as "Nuclear Family Month" and defining family as a man, a woman, and their children. The timing is deliberate: June is Pride Month, a time when LGBTQ+ communities and allies celebrate the full diversity of human relationships and family structures. This proclamation is not a neutral act of recognition—it is a pointed rejection of that diversity.
At OPEN, we support the right of all people to lead lives that are authentic to their values and convictions. For some, that includes monogamous partnerships and raising children in a household that reflects what is often described as "traditional." That choice deserves respect—just as all family structures do.
But let's be clear: designating a "Nuclear Family Month" in Tennessee is part of a broader, coordinated national effort to elevate one narrow vision of family while marginalizing and stigmatizing everyone else. This proclamation doesn't just exclude LGBTQ+ families or consensually non-monogamous relationships—it erases the lived reality of millions of families that don't fit the mold, including single parents, blended families, multigenerational households, families headed by grandparents or other relatives, and countless other configurations that reflect how people actually live and care for one another.
We are seeing this pattern play out across the country. Efforts to restrict who counts as a legitimate family are part of a broader push to roll back rights and freedoms across multiple fronts. LGBTQ+ people face attacks on their rights to marry, adopt, and access healthcare. Transgender people are being denied gender-affirming care, accurate identity documents, and the ability to participate fully in public life. Access to reproductive healthcare is under siege. No-fault divorce is being challenged. And while consensually non-monogamous families face different forms and degrees of marginalization—often social stigma and legal invisibility rather than outright criminalization—they too are left vulnerable to discrimination in housing, employment, custody decisions, and access to family benefits, with little to no legal recourse.
Against that backdrop, proclamations like Tennessee's are signals. They reinforce a worldview that seeks to narrow the definition of family and determine whose relationships count as “valid.” These efforts are deeply out of step with the lived reality of American families.
At their core, these policies attempt to impose a minority viewpoint on the vast majority of people. According to recent data from the Pew Research Center, only 18% of U.S. households reflect the "nuclear family" ideal that our laws and social standards continue to privilege. For most of us, our experience of family looks very different.
At OPEN, we believe that relationship diversity is not a threat to society – it is a reflection of it. The freedom to build families, partnerships, and support systems that reflect our lived realities is inseparable from the broader struggles for gender equity, racial justice, queer liberation, and bodily autonomy. When one of us is targeted, all of us are made more vulnerable.
We reject efforts to divide families into categories of "acceptable" and "other." Instead, we affirm a simple principle: everyone deserves the freedom to define their own relationships, their own families, and their own future—without interference, stigma, or state-imposed hierarchy.
