For the past two years, thousands of people have descended on a public park in Franklin, Tennessee for an LGBTQ+ pride festival featuring live music, food trucks, and crafts vendors. Clayton Klutts, the president of the Franklin Pride organization, viewed the event as a glowing symbol of how far a small, conservative community had come in terms of LGBTQ+ acceptance.
But this year, Franklin Pride’s attempts to obtain a city permit have been met with fierce resistance. The conflict came to a head during a public forum at City Hall late last month, one day after a 28-year-old shot and killed six people at a private Christian school in Nashville — a massacre that some on the right blamed on the suspect’s gender identity. More than 30 people, many of them wearing circular “Choose Decency” stickers, pleaded with Franklin’s mayor and the city board’s eight aldermen to deny the pride permit. Only six people spoke in favor of the permit, nearly all of them members of the LGBTQ+ organization behind the festival.
The fight in Franklin, a city of roughly 85,000 people, echoes earlier battles over LGBTQ acceptance from more than three decades ago and comes amid a nationwide backlash among conservatives against the rights of transgender people to obtain medical care, drag artists to perform in public and LGBTQ+ people to see themselves reflected in school library books, curricula and the culture at large.
Nashville Area LGBTQ+ Fight For Their Right To Celebrate Pride
- Al Ferguson
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