“A federal judge says Tennessee’s first-in-the-nation law designed to place strict limits on drag shows is unconstitutional,” the AP reports.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, wrote that the law was both “unconstitutionally vague and substantially overbroad.” He also added that the statute encouraged “discriminatory enforcement.”
From the opinion: “There is no question that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment. But there is a difference between material that is ‘obscene’ in the vernacular, and material that is ‘obscene’ under the law. Simply put, no majority of the Supreme Court has held that sexually explicit — but not obscene — speech receives less protection than political, artistic, or scientific speech.”
