This city banned displays of homosexuality in public as “indecent behavior”

The city of Murfreesboro in central Tennessee in June banned public displays of sexual behavior, including “behaviors, materials or events that are patently offensive to the adult community.”

“Sexual conduct” barred under the city ordinance includes “homosexuality.”

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The ordinance outlawing “indecent behavior” in public and prohibiting “indecent materials,” recently reported by journalist Erin Reed, is “alarmingly vague” and could lead to arrests for public displays of affection as innocuous as two men holding hands.

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City ordinance 23-0-22 states that local lawmakers have “the right to establish and preserve contemporary community standards.”

The definition used in the new law is based on a longtime city statute that explicitly bans public homosexuality or materials that promote homosexuality.

Now local lawmakers have given police the authority to crack down on any violations they deem offensive to “community standards.” 

“No person shall knowingly while in a public space engage in indecent behavior,” the ordinance reads, while reserving special mention for violations that “subject minors to a prurient interest or to behaviors.”

The ordinance 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 a person be female, breast.”

The new municipal code initially targeted Pride events in the city. Now local lawmakers are deploying the ordinance to ban books with LGBTQ+ content from the city library system.

In August, library officials banned four books from Murfreesboro libraries based on the ordinance, including Flamer, Let’s Talk About It, Queerfully and Wonderfully Made, and This Book Is Gay.

Following that successful effort, on Monday a steering committee met to discuss a new resolution that would ban all books in the library that could possibly violate the ordinance.  

The plan by committee members claiming an obligation to protect children and a right to “enforce community standards” encountered opposition from community members dedicated to free speech.

Citing a challenge to the law already underway in the courts, local activist Kari Lambert excoriated the committee, asking members, “When have the people who ban books ever been the good guys?”

That court challenge, filed by the ACLU on behalf of BoroPride, zeroes in on the underlying assumption in the ordinance that homosexuality itself is indecent and therefore punishable by law.

“The ordinance incorporates an earlier provision that defines indecent behavior as including not simply masturbation and sexual intercourse (which most would agree are inappropriate in public), but also any acts of ‘homosexuality’ as a whole. Thus, under the Ordinance and the incorporated definition, any acts that are homosexual in nature or any material or event even suggesting homosexuality could be considered indecent and subject to civil and criminal penalties.”