Viral claim misleads on Tennessee city's controversial ban on public homosexuality | Fact check

Joedy McCreary, USA TODAY
·4 min read
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The claim: Post implies Murfreesboro, Tennessee, banned being gay in public in November 2023

A Nov. 16 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows a photo of downtown Murfreesboro, Tennessee, along with a description of an anti-LGBTQ+ ordinance purportedly in effect there.

“A city in Tennessee has BANNED being gay in public,” reads part of the text from the left-wing Occupy Democrats account. “Murfreesboro, Tennessee passed an ordinance claiming that ‘acts of’ being ‘homosexual’ is (sic) considered ‘sexual conduct’ and may no longer be seen in public.”

Many social media users took the post to mean the ban was a recent happening.

"Buckle up, the fascist gop is just getting started," one user wrote.

It was liked more than 10,000 times in five days. Occupy Democrats also posted the photo on Facebook, where it was shared more than 1,000 times in five days before the caption was updated. The Instagram post includes no such update.

More from the USA TODAY Fact Check Team:

Our rating: Missing context

The implied claim is wrong. The latest action on this topic did the opposite of what the post says. A decades-old ordinance that included homosexuality in the city's definition of prohibited sexual conduct was amended in November 2023 to remove that term from the definition.

City ordinance cited ‘sexual conduct’ definition from 1949

Two Tennessee-based experts described the claim as misleading.

“The Murfreesboro City Council did not vote to ban homosexuality,” Ken Paulson, the director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, told USA TODAY in an email.

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The council passed an ordinance in June to limit public behavior it considers indecent, including drag performances, said Paulson, a former editor-in-chief at USA TODAY.

The core of the issue is how the measure defines "sexual conduct." The June ordinance contained a reference to a section of the city's code that dates to 1949 and included "homosexuality" in its definition of prohibited "sexual conduct," the Murfreesboro Daily News Journal reported.

The city code was previously updated in 1977, but the reference to "homosexuality" was left unchanged. That definition included homosexuality on a list of actions that include masturbating, having sexual intercourse or making physical contact with a person's clothed or unclothed genitals or the breast of a female.

“In their haste to legislate public morality, the city council banned sexual conduct as it was described in that 1977 section of the code,” Paulson said. “It had never been updated.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee sued the city Oct. 6 on behalf of the Tennessee Equality Project Foundation, a nonprofit LGBTQ+ rights group, over the ordinance. The groups alleged the ordinance violated the First and 14th Amendments for limiting free speech rights and discriminating against LGBTQ+ people.

On Oct. 20, a federal judge temporarily blocked the city from enforcing the ordinance, and the council voted unanimously on Nov. 2 to amend the city code and remove homosexuality from its definition of sexual conduct.

“It’s clear that this was not on anyone’s radar until somebody went back and looked at the old statutory definition in the Murfreesboro city ordinance and realized that it still included this term – homosexuality,” said Jennifer Shinall, a law professor at Vanderbilt University.

The change took effect 15 days after its passage, according to the amendment's text – or Nov. 17, the day after the social media user shared the photo.

“The post was created after it was no longer an issue, which, of course, makes it misleading as well,” Shinall said.

USA TODAY has fact-checked an array of previous claims from Occupy Democrats, including misleading assertions that Republicans voted to raise the retirement age to 70, that Trump increased the debt 'far more than any president in history' and that Kevin McCarthy raised congressional pay by $30,000, circumventing the Constitution.

USA TODAY reached out to Occupy Democrats but did not immediately receive a response.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Tennessee city's ban on public homosexuality was lifted | Fact check