Arizona Republican Rep. Andy Biggs, one of the 40 lawmakers who voted against the coronavirus stimulus bill, said he did so in part because the legislation included paid sick leave benefits for domestic partnerships. “They’ve redefined family for the first time in a federal — in a piece of federal legislation, to include committed relationships,” Biggs said Monday on a radio program produced by the conservative Christian group Family Research Council. “The problem with that is it’s really hard to define a committed relationship, and it’s really hard to define anything related to that.”

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which passed on Friday evening in the House of Representatives, provides expanded coverage for Covid-19 diagnostic tests; broadened unemployment and food stamp benefits; and included provisions to provide tax credits to cover two weeks of limited paid sick leave and up to three months of family and medical leave payments to care for those affected by the novel coronavirus. The provision that raised Biggs’s ire, which references “committed relationships,” is a subsection of the paid sick leave provision of the bill. It defined children eligible for care under the proposed law as a “biological, foster, or adopted child, a stepchild, a child of a domestic partner.” The bill went on to further define a domestic partner as two individuals in a “committed relationship,” at least 18 years of age, in which each individual acts as the other’s sole domestic partner with shared responsibility for each others’ common welfare, including couples in same-sex domestic partnerships or same-sex unions.

The legislative text is hardly new, as Biggs contended. The exact same legislative text around domestic partnerships and committed relationships is found in several bills in Congress, including paid sick leave legislation proposed as far back as 2015. Biggs is a Christian conservative who previously called the Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry, an attempt to “redefine marriage” and “an affront to the millions of Americans who believe marriage is between a man and a woman.” He previously served as the Arizona state Senate president, a role which he used to usher in legislation for business owners to assert religious belief in order to refuse service to LGBT people and others.