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Tennessee Judge Rules That Law Banning Drag Shows Is Constitutionally BS

I wonder if they will be banning children from attending Tyler Perry shows?

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The showIn today’s episode of politicians doing more to stop trans people than to stop school shootings, there’s been an interesting development with the Tennessee law meant to ban drag performances in public spaces. As it turns out, the law is vague. Not just practically so, constitutionally. From Reuters:

A federal judge in Memphis, Tennessee, on Friday temporarily blocked a law restricting drag performances in public from going into effect, saying it was likely “vague and overly-broad” in its restriction of speech.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a Republican, in February, had signed the bill passed by the state’s legislature that was meant to go into effect on Saturday. The bill aimed to restrict drag performances in public or in front of children, putting the state at the forefront of a Republican-led effort to limit drag in at least 15 states in recent months.

The judge said the state had failed to justify with a compelling interest the restrictions it aimed to impose.

Lee had said the law would protect children from being “potentially exposed to sexualized entertainment, to obscenity.”

I think that the fallout surrounding this law and ones like it is interesting because it — by the necessity of determining the legal significance of terms like obscenity and sexualized entertainment — could force the public to critique our public notions of common sense. Take, for example, this poster insisting on a distinction between the “sexualized entertainment and obscenity” of taking children to a drag show versus taking them to a Hooters. The saving grace? Cleavage modesty:

Coupled with the distinction of Hooters performance of  “tasteful femininity” versus Twin Peaks, we also have the contrast of “high art” with the obscenity 0f Michelangelo’s “David” when it comes to parents insisting on what is in good taste with scholastic curricula.

The liminal spaces and conflicts of our time — Republicans being mad at a Supreme Court justice not being able to define a woman, parents offended at what passes for high art, and the legality of it all, are the conflicts that define epochs and make jurisprudence interesting.

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Judge Blocks Tennessee Law Restricting Drag Performances In Public [Reuters]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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