News/Commentary

Gov. Newsom falsely claims Tennessee town ‘banned being gay in public’

November 19, 2023 | | Print Article

Far-left California Gov. Gavin Newsom is facing a world of hurt for smearing a small Tennessee town as anti-gay.

“A city in Tennessee has banned being gay in public. This is just the beginning. We have to call this out,” the governor tweeted on Thursday.

Look:

The tweet linked to a piece from The New Republic, a radically far-left outlet, claiming that the Tennessee town of Murfreesboro has banned homosexuality in public.

“Murfreesboro passed an ordinance in June banning ‘indecent behavior,’ including ‘indecent exposure, public indecency, lewd behavior, nudity or sexual conduct,'” the piece reads.

This part is true.

“No person shall knowingly while in a public space engage in indecent behavior, display, distribute, or broadcast indecent material, conduct indecent events, or facilitate any of the foregoing prohibited acts, or otherwise subject minors to a prurient interest or to behaviors, materials, or events that are patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable material for minors,” the ordinance reads.

“[T]his ordinance specifically mentions Section 21-72 of the city code. The city code states that sexual conduct includes homosexuality,” The New Public’s piece continues.

This part is false.

According to Nashville station WTVF, earlier this month “the city amended the ordinance banning public homosexuality and removed it from being included in the definition of sexual conduct under what is considered ‘indecent behavior.’”

In fairness to the city’s critics, it amended the ordinance only after the Tennessee Equality Project and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against them.

“The suit pointed out that the city’s definition of ‘indecency’ rested on an older statute, dating back to at least 1977, that declared ‘public acts of […] homosexuality’ to be inherently indecent, and on the same footing as public masturbation,” according to Them magazine.

“The TEP argued in their lawsuit that the June ordinance was ‘staggeringly vague and overbroad’ and violated federal nondiscrimination laws to deliberately target LGBTQ+ Tennesseans,” the magazine notes.

Still, the point remains the same: Homosexuality is NOT banned in Murfreesboro, and so Newsom’s tweet was flat-out wrong, as critics were quick to note:

That being said, leftists have also complained about the ordinance being used to ban sexually explicit books from school libraries.

“In August, the Rutherford County Library Board, citing the city’s order, removed four books with LGBTQ themes from libraries. Under the guise of enforcing the ordinance, the county instituted a library card system in October to bar minors from checking out books it considers objectionable unless their parent or guardian opts them out of the system,” MSNBC complained in a recent report.

“More recently, the county board put forward a proposal to remove all books from the library that could possibly violate the ordinance. … Keri Lambert, a local activist, angrily addressed officials at a Nov. 2 meeting: ‘When, in the history of the world, have the people banning books been the good guys?’ she asked,” the report continued.

Keep in mind these books contain extremely graphic sexual content, including depictions of boys and girls giving and receiving oral sex.

Case in point (*extremely graphic content):

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Vivek Saxena
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