Federal judge rules Tennessee’s drag ban as “unconstitutionally vague and overbroad”
In a win for LGBTQ+ rights, a Tennessee judge has thrown out the state’s archaic drag ban. Back in March, Republican governor Bill Lee signed Senate Bill 3 (Adult Entertainment Act) into law, making it the first state in the US to ban public drag shows.
However a day before the archaic law was set to go into effect, Judge Thomas Parker issued a 14-day temporary order blocking the legislation –which was in response to the LGBTQ+ theatre group, Friends of George’s, lawsuit against the state. “The United States Constitution – a law that is supreme even to the Tennessee General Assembly’s acts – has placed some issues beyond the reach of the democratic process,” Judge Parker said in his statement.
Fortunately, Judge Parker’s temporary injunction – which was later extended to 26 May – wasn’t his last ruling in favour of Tennessee’s LGBTQ+ community.
On 2 June, the US District Court judge officially struck down the Adult Entertainment Act law for being “unconstitutionally vague and substantially overbroad.” “The AEA’s ‘harmful to minors’ standard applies to minors to all ages, so it fails to provide fair notice of what is prohibited, and it encourages discriminatory enforcement,” he said in the 70-page ruling. “The AEA is substantially over-broad because it applies to public property or “anywhere” a minor could be present.” Judge Parker went on to say that the Tennessee General Assembly “carelessly, if not intentionally, passed the AEA for the inappropriate purpose of chilling constitutionally-protected speech.” “The Court finds that the AEA’s text discriminates against a certain viewpoint, imposes criminal sanctions, and spans a virtually unlimited geographical area,” Parker’s ruling added. “As a criminal statute that
