In June, the City of Murfreesboro, Tennessee adopted an anti-‘indecent behavior’ ordinance that effectively bans homosexuality along with indecent exposure, public indecency, lewd behavior, nudity or sexual conduct. The ordinance’s ban on homosexuality appears to have only become public after city officials began enforcing the statute to remove pornographic and lewd books from city libraries.
The Murfreesboro Municipal Code Section 21-72 defines “sexual conduct” as “…acts of masturbation, homosexuality, sexual intercourse, or physical contact with a person’s clothed or unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks or, if such person be a female, breast.” To remove books from city libraries, however, officials have used the Code’s definition of “harmful to minors” which includes:
(2) is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable material for minors; and, (3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
In October, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the city on behalf of the Tennessee Equality Project (TEP), asking a federal court to declare the ordinance ‘unconstitutional’. According to the ACLU “…the Murfreesboro mayor and city manager engaged in a yearlong, concerted anti-LGBTQ+ campaign to chill TEP and Murfreesboro residents’ protected speech and expression, culminating in the city establishing an official policy prohibiting the issuance of permits to TEP.”
In late October, Chief U.S. District Court Judge Waverly Crenshaw Jr. issued a temporary order blocking Murfreesboro city officials from enforcing the ordinance to ban the BoroPride Festival.
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