This town banned Pride because of drag. Now they’re getting sued for restricting free speech.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ACLU of Tennessee have sued a Tennessee town over its alleged efforts to silence a local LGBTQ+ organization, which include a city-wide policy denying the group permits to host events and a local ordinance aimed at banning drag performances.

As the Los Angeles Blade reports, the lawsuit, filed last week on behalf of the Tennessee Equality Project Foundation (TEP), accuses the city of Murfreesboro of “flagrant and ongoing violations of TEP’s constitutional rights to free speech and expression, due process, and equal protection under the law.”

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“Since at least October 2022, the City has engaged in a targeted campaign to silence TEP’s speech in support of the Murfreesboro LGBTQ+ community,” the suit claims. “First, the City put in place a discriminatory policy, prohibiting TEP from obtaining permits to host its annual BoroPride Festival and any other events on City property. Then, it enacted a discriminatory ordinance meant to drive TEP and the City’s LGBTQ+ community—and, in particular, its drag performers—out of the City’s public spaces. These actions, which were driven by animus against the LGBTQ+ community, are blatantly unconstitutional.”

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According to the lawsuit, following TEP’s sixth annual BoroPride Festival in September 2022, anti-LGBTQ+ activist and failed congressional candidate Robby Starbuck posted video from the festival falsely characterizing a drag performance as “illegal sexualization of kids.” After initially acknowledging TEP and performers’ First Amendment rights, according to the lawsuit, Murfreesboro Mayor Shane McFarland and City Manager Craig Tindall “[bowed] to pressure from anti-drag activists” and “set out to ensure BoroPride events would never again be hosted on City property.”

The suit accuses the city of mounting a “two-front assault on TEP’s constitutional freedoms.” Last October, Tindall banned the city’s Parks and Recreation officials from renting city facilities to TEP, and informed the organization that he would deny them all future special events permits, accusing them of exposing children to “conduct and speech of an explicitly sexual nature” at the 2022 BoroPride event. TEP was denied a permit for its 2023 event.

In June 2023, the Murfreesboro City Council approved a new city ordinance, which the lawsuit characterizes as a “thinly-veiled drag ban.”

Murfreesboro City Ordinance 23-O-22 “sets forth staggeringly vague and overbroad restrictions on speech and expression throughout the City and provides for civil and criminal penalties for anyone City or law enforcement officials deem to have engaged in ‘indecent behavior’ or to have distributed ‘indecent materials’ or held ‘indecent events,’” the lawsuit states. The ordinance defines “indecent behavior” as including “acts of homosexuality.”

“City officials intentionally drafted and enacted the Ordinance to chill speech and expression by and related to the LGBTQ+ community, including specifically TEP’s speech, and even more specifically, TEP’s speech at its BoroPride event,” the suit alleges. According to the lawsuit, the ordinance has also been used to justify bans on LGBTQ+ books in local libraries.

The lawsuit accuses the city of violating TEP’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights, as well protections under the Tennessee state constitution.

In a press release, Li Nowlin-Sohl, staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, said that “Murfreesboro officials have engaged in a baseless, unconstitutional campaign to censor and restrict the lawful speech of BoroPride.”

“BoroPride celebrates the growing and vibrant LGBTQ+ community in the Murfreesboro area,” said TEP executive director Chris Sanders. “Being able to hold our events in public spaces on the same terms as any other group is the basic fairness that we seek.”

“The government has no right to censor LGBTQ+ people and our expression,” Stella Yarbrough, legal director at the ACLU of Tennessee, said. “Restricting drag performances and censoring affirming LGBTQ+ messages are discriminatory actions and violate community members’ First Amendment rights.”

A federal judge this summer threw out Tennessee’s state-wide drag ban. In his ruling, Trump appointee judge Thomas Parker said the law was “unconstitutionally vague and substantially overbroad,” that it would encourage “discriminatory enforcement,” and that it violated the First Amendment’s free speech protections.