Month: July 2021

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Born in the U.S.A.

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Now that the Fourth of July is past us and we’ve had the usual full-plate serving of ridiculous posturing of how great we are, can we have an honest discussion about what a shithole this place has become? At what point does a great society hit a point of no return? At what point do you have to throw in the towel? Let’s play a game of divorcing you from your beliefs.

What if, let’s say, Ecuador were only 250 years old, and — depending on how you defined it — they’d been in anywhere from 83 to 134 wars. What if it weren’t even clear if their president needed congressional approval to declare war anymore? Now, except for the War of 1812, what if Ecuador had never been invaded? How would you feel about Ecuador if they did this? Seriously? Wouldn’t you think they were a warlike people? What if they said it was all in the name of defending their country and democracy as a whole? But they only attacked other places and fought on foreign soil? Wouldn’t you think that was pretty stupid? What if Ecuador spent more money on their military than the next 10 countries combined? Would you think that was coincidental? What if Ecuador were the number-one arms manufacturer in the entire world, and the people who made the weapons controlled their government? And made billions from war? And they had the second-highest instance of gun-related civilian deaths in the entire world? Would you think that was sort of kind of suspicious? Or would you just blow it off?

What if, on closer examination, you realized that Ecuador had the highest taxes in the world, but 40 percent of their discretionary budget went to the military? Wouldn’t that be nuts? What if you then found out that they were the only country out of the top 35 industrialized countries in the world that didn’t have free healthcare provided, despite taking all that tax money? What if you realized they were the only country in the world whose public education was funded by local taxes, thus ensuring the poorest people got the shittiest education, thus continuing an endless cycle of poverty?

What if in Ecuador, 1 percent of the population owned more wealth than the bottom 92 percent of the country? And could give as much money to politicians as they wanted during elections? And 75 percent of people lived paycheck to paycheck with zero savings? Would you think they were a democratic and representative society? Would you think that was a good standard of living or low-stress?

What if Ecuador had 4.25 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s prison population? And the jails in Ecuador were privately owned, and the companies that owned them made about $46,000 per person per year through forced labor and making them pay for supplies? Would you begin to wonder if maybe a lot of those people shouldn’t be in jail?

What if in Ecuador, the number-one cause of bankruptcy was medical bills, and one in three GoFundMe campaigns were to raise money for medical needs because it was too costly to get sick? What if Ecuador had a declining life-span age, as well as the fastest-growing chronic disease, suicide, depression, and addiction problems in the world and was the only country in the world that allowed pharmaceutical companies to advertise on TV? What if Ecuador had giant farms that had completely taken over food production, if there were almost no regulation on pesticide use, GMOs, steroids — in fact, what if the biggest chemical agribusiness in the country sat on the FDA or EPA there? Would you think maybe that was a conflict of interest and not good for people’s health?

What if in Ecuador, if you had enough money, you could pollute as much as you wanted? What if you also didn’t have to pay any taxes if you were rich? Would you think it was a corrupt society, or is that normal? What if Ecuador was 44th in the world in freedom of the press? Would you think there was probably a lot of government-controlled propaganda? What if Ecuador was 128th in the world in safety? How would you feel about going there or living there if you had kids?

What if Ecuador was the country most in debt in the entire world, despite being the largest economy, and if, in fact, that debt was greater than their total GDP? Wouldn’t you think that the government there was totally corrupt and irresponsible? What if, to combat this, 40 percent of the currency in circulation in the entire country was printed in the last 12 months? Would you think of investing in that currency? Would you think maybe that would be why Ecuador was seeing rampant inflation of goods?

What if there was rampant racism, fascism, mass shootings, childhood poverty, homelessness, and violence in Ecuador? Would you think it was awesome? Would you feel that was normal? If five to 10 people every day on the news in your city died or were wounded from gun violence that had nothing to do with the military — how would you feel about that? Is that good? Is that normal?

At what point do you guys think a great society has hit a point of no return? Would you say maybe Ecuador was about to collapse? Or is it just something that needs to be sorted out?
Kevin Ferner is the owner of The Memphis Guitar Spa and Ferner Fine Instruments, and is not dead yet.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Pandemic of Ignorance

Tucker Carlson (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

More than 10,000 nearly identical bills have been introduced by Republicans in legislatures around the country to stop what they say is a rampant movement to install Sharia law in our courts, governments, and schools. Muslims, the GOP alleges, are planning to start teaching Sharia law to our children. Local chapters of the Washington, D.C.-based ACT for America, which describes itself as the “NRA of national security,” are encouraging their supporters to show up at school board meetings and legislative hearings and to flood lawmakers’ inboxes and phone lines in support of anti-Sharia law bills. Right-wing media hosts are stirring up their viewers and listeners with a constant drumbeat against the impending peril of Sharia law. …

Wait a minute. … Oooh, shoot. This is embarrassing. Folks, I accidently used some of my notes from 2012 to start this column. Damn. I hate to retype all that. Here’s an idea: Wherever you see “Sharia law” in that first paragraph, substitute “critical race theory.” 

So here we are, once again dealing with a well-organized campaign over a non-issue meant to divert the mouth-breathing GOP base — and the national media — from any substantive debate on real issues. File this with: Liberals will take your guns, gay marriage will destroy society, transgender folks will take over women’s sports and pee in the wrong bathroom, climate change is bogus, and COVID vaccines are a government plot akin to the Holocaust. 

We are in the middle of a full-blown pandemic of ignorance, and it’s an aggressive strain — easily spread by social media campaigns, cynical politicians, and television hosts who prey on human gullibility, naivete, and plain old stupidity. This pandemic is being spread intentionally. You don’t have to be within six feet of another person to get it. A mask won’t save you. The viral ignorance is everywhere, but it’s particularly rampant in red states and among Republicans and other consumers of right-wing media. 

This pandemic is anti-science. It is anti-common-sense. And it is killing people. It is one thing to deny that raging forest fires, record floods, unprecedented droughts, record-setting heat waves and deep freezes, melting ice caps, and rising sea levels are just “weather.” Yes, that’s ignorance, and yes, it is literally killing people, but it is not as clearly ignorant as refusing to take a vaccine that could save your life. That is next-level stupid. And it appears to have infected around 30 percent of the country’s adults. 

Those resisting the vaccine give a number of reasons: Vaccines may have bad side effects. (COVID definitely has bad side effects.) I have powerful T-cells and natural immunity. (No, you don’t.) I don’t trust the government. (But you trust conspiracy websites and Tucker Carlson?) It’s my body and my choice! (You know who doesn’t have a choice? Millions of unvaccinated school children headed back to class in August. Maybe think about them.)

The evidence could not possibly be clearer that the vaccines stop COVID. In one study released just last week, 99.2 percent of those who’d died from the Delta variant were unvaccinated. 

In Arkansas, the Delta variant is spreading rapidly. Just north of there, Missouri has become the poster child for the pandemic of ignorance, a blotch of deep purple on The New York Times’ daily map showing COVID hot spots and high-risk areas. Springfield hospitals have sent out a request for ventilators. Most counties in Southern Missouri have vaccination rates in the 25 percent range. It’s going to get worse there before it gets better, since many are still resisting getting the shot (unlike the Fox News hosts ranting against the vaccine — most of whom got the jab months ago). 

Meanwhile, here in Shelby County, our vaccination rate hovers at around 35 percent. Local officials are urging those who are still unvaccinated to get it done soon. I hope people listen. I mean, if we can stop Sharia law, surely we can stop the pandemic of ignorance.  

Categories
Music Music Features

Shake a Leg with Bruce Watson’s Just Leg It Compilation

“Just Leg It” sounds like slang somebody made up in the ’30s or ’40s.

It’s not. It’s the title of a new album produced, mixed, and recorded by Bruce Watson of Fat Possum and Big Legal Mess Records.

“It’s a term for dancing I made up,” says Watson. “When people hear the record, I hope they ‘just leg it.’”

The album includes 19 party instrumentals from Memphis and North Mississippi artists, including Matt Ross-Spang, Jimbo Mathus, Will Sexton, Jack Oblivian, and Memphis Flyer’s Alex Greene.

There was “really no idea” behind the album, which Watson began working on nine years ago. “It was an excuse for a bunch of friends and musicians to get together and hang out. And make up songs, basically.

 “I would come in with old records and say, ‘Okay. Let’s kind of build something inspired by this.’ Someone would come up with a riff and we could record it on one-inch eight-track tape.”

Watson began recording with a few musicians at Dial Back Sound, a recording studio he owned in Water Valley, Mississippi. 

He recorded nine tracks and then put the album away for a while. “I sold that studio and moved to Memphis five years ago,” he says. “I put a little studio in a building in Memphis and started working with guys like Matt Ross-Spang, Will Sexton, George Sluppick, Jack [Oblivian] Yarber, Mark Edgar Stuart. We would just kind of hang out and do the same thing. So, that’s how the whole thing came together. There wasn’t any big plan.”

Also, he says, “I had been in production for about 10 years and hadn’t been engineering. I used this as an excuse to get my engineering chops back. It was really to go back in the studio and twist some knobs and do the engineering thing.”

Why did it take nine years to complete? “We did two songs, and then we wouldn’t do anything for six months. There was no urgency. I was producing and recording a lot of other records, running Fat Possum Records.

“About two years ago I said, ‘Well, I’ve got all these songs. Why don’t I do something with it?’ So, I reached out to Kerri Mahoney, a graphic designer, and said, ‘Let’s come up with a concept. I’ve got this idea — Just Leg It. People dancing on the front. And just a fun party record.’ So she came up with the design.”

The cover and selections evoke the ’60s, Watson says. “And it also ties into a whole tradition of instrumental music. It was really inspired by the Hi Records catalog of instrumental records.”

Watson didn’t just make up the album title. “All the titles on the record I just made up. Man, when I would go on trips — especially driving around small towns — I would see stuff to give me inspiration for a name and I’d jot it down. When I was putting it all together, I had a list of about 100 names, and I’d pick one and assign it to a song.

 “I can’t remember if I was in the Arkansas Delta or Mississippi Delta, but I saw a pawn shop that said, ‘We have machine guns.’ I thought, ‘That’s a good name for a song: Delta Machine Gun.’”

Watson currently is involved in recording gospel music at his Bible & Tire Recording Co. in Memphis. “We are approaching sacred soul or gospel music kind of in the way it would have been recorded in the ’60s and sounded in the ’60s — pretty stripped down, pretty raw.”

 Meanwhile, Watson is pleased with Just Leg It. “There’s something about improvising a song on the spot, capturing it in one or two takes, and that’s it.” 

Then there’s “the party aspect,” he says. “Something you can put on and not really think too much about it. It’s fun. You don’t have to sit there and analyze lyrics. You don’t have to think about this. 

“The songs are happy. A couple are dark, but for the most part, it’s a pretty happy and upbeat record.”   

Categories
News News Feature

Terms of Confusion: Value vs. Growth

Kseniia Samoylenko on Unsplash

Question: I see a lot of articles about value vs. growth and which stock will do better over time, but I’m not sure what that means. What should an average investor know about value and growth? 

Answer: This is a confusing topic because there are many definitions and they are used loosely and interchangeably. Here are a few examples of what value and growth mean to different people: 

Professors Eugene Fama and Kenneth French did research into factors that drive investment returns. Dividing the overall market value of a company by the value of assets they own creates a metric called the “price-to-book” (p/b) ratio. This is one way of considering whether a company is cheap or expensive. Famously, the Fama-French research found that cheap stocks (low p/b) tend to outperform expensive stocks (high p/b). They called the cheap stocks “value” and the expensive stocks “growth.” It’s unfortunate that they decided to use these terms because “growth” sounds much more alluring than “expensive,” which is what the authors really meant by growth in this context. 

There’s a category of active investment managers known as value investors, and they don’t give a darn how a couple of finance professors define value and growth. Value investors simply like to try to buy a dollar for less than a dollar by finding undervalued, underpriced, misunderstood opportunities. Their picks might often have a low p/b ratio but just as easily might not. For example, Alphabet (Google) is a position widely held by value investors today. They likely choose it not because it is cheap by traditional valuation metrics, but rather because they believe there are aspects of the company the market doesn’t fully understand or appreciate. A value investor could easily buy an “expensive” stock like Google if their calculations suggest it’s worth more than its market price today. Note that expensive and cheap have nothing to do with the share price. In this context, it doesn’t matter if the share price is $5 or $5,000. 

A more informal definition of value vs. growth has to do with earnings.  Companies that are growing quickly might not pay a dividend today, but the promise of big future dividends or an eventual payout due to the company being acquired is enough to draw investors in. These are often referred to as growth companies. Mature companies that are not growing quickly attract investors through things like dividends, share buybacks, and mergers and are considered value companies. This is probably the least clearly defined facet of value vs. growth, and is probably best summarized as young companies (growth) vs. mature companies (value). There’s no widely accepted definition here, but most people know it when they see it. 

To further confuse things, there is the matter of mutual fund regulation. Each fund is required to state a prospectus objective. A pure bond fund with the goal of generating investment income from bond coupons is likely to have an income objective. A stock fund targeting share price appreciation with little or no dividend yield tends to state growth as an objective. Funds targeting a mix of the two often declare they are “growth and income” funds. Here, growth means “stuff we hope will increase in price over time,” or just stock exposure. It has nothing to do with the specific qualities of the companies being purchased. 

When an average person chooses funds in a 401k, they probably aren’t applying any of these definitions. Sadly, it can end up being like a Rorschach test — does value or growth define you as a person? (Side note: Don’t pick funds like this!) 

There’s a deep desire in our reductionist culture to simplify complex concepts into single numbers or labels, which is the reason why the investment community has tried to cram a wide variety of concepts into these two simple terms. There’s no simple answer that will always work perfectly in every market environment; otherwise, everyone would be doing it and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.  

Whether you choose your own investments or use an advisor, always make investment decisions deliberately and with full understanding of how investments are picked by the fund manager and why.  A mistake compounded over time can have profound negative implications, just as good choices can pave the long-term path to a secure financial future, whether those choices are labeled value, growth, or something else entirely.
Gene Gard is Co-Chief-Investment Officer at Telarray, a Memphis-based wealth management firm that helps families navigate investment, tax, estate, and retirement decisions. 

Categories
We Recommend

Hi Tone Hosts 901 Poetry Slam Series Finale

Shiloh Grace takes the audience on a phallic journey at the Hi Tone. (Photo: Julie Ray)

On a quiet Monday night, I found a parking spot behind the Hi Tone between two overflowing dumpsters. A sign on the front door facing the street led me there, stating, “Entrance in back, upstairs.” Pink spilled out of the doorway from the stage illuminated by vivid red lights. 

Steve Fox, the host, sat near the stage where a woman read poetry from her phone. She spoke of a young girl with flowers in her hair. Fox pointed to the next to last name on a list of poets who had signed up to read. It said Ce Jay. When she finished, Fox snapped his fingers. Others clapped. 

Along with writing poetry, Ce Jay has been an educator for 16 years. “My background starts with Bridge Builders, where I not only worked but am a product of the program.”

The last name on the list was Shiloh Grace, who recited a poem written in 1993, “Ode to the American Dick,” inspired by Lorena Bobbitt. Ouch.

“I’ve felt like the Hi Tone has been my home base for decades now, across three locations.” Grace extols the virtues of her safe space without mincing words, “It’s the quintessential dive bar sans hipster shit. It’s the kind of place where subcultures collide, where we can all be ourselves. No pretense. It’s easy to lose track of time ’cause the drinks are strong and conversations are long. It feels like an alternate reality where all the rest of life’s crap can just get lost for a while.”

Proceeds benefit the artists.   

901 Poetry Slam Series Finale, Hi Tone, 282 N. Cleveland, Monday, July 19, 8-10 p.m., $9.01.

Categories
Memphis Gaydar

Study Could Allow More Blood Donations from Sexually Active Gay Men

Credit: ADVANCE study

Memphis is one of eight sites for a new study that could broaden blood-donor eligibility for men who have sex with men. 

In April 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Adminstration (FDA) deferred a man who had sex with another man from donating blood for three months following his most recent sexual contact with another man. The aim of the policy is to reduce the risk of infection, including HIV, from reaching the blood supply. 

In May, three of the nation’s largest blood centers — Vitalant, OneBlood, and the American Red Cross — announced the pilot study funded by the FDA. The study is called Assessing Donor Variability And New Concepts in Eligibility (ADVANCE) and is being conducted at sites in Memphis, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Orlando, New Orleans/Baton Rouge, Miami, Los Angeles, and Atlanta.

Researchers hope to determine if an individual risk analysis for donors would be as effective as the time deferral method. To get there, they are looking at possible changes to the donor history questionnaire, a series of questions that all potential blood donors answer before donating. The questions assess risk factors that could indicate possible infection with a transfusion transmissible infection, including HIV. 

“The ADVANCE study is a first step in providing data that will help the FDA determine if a donor history questionnaire based on individual risk would be as effective as time-based deferral in reducing the risk of HIV in the blood supply,” said Brian Custer, vice president of research and scientific programs with Vitalant Research Institute.

In all, researchers hope to enroll 2,000 participants aged 18-39, about 250 to 300 from each study area. In Memphis, the study is led by Vitalant and supported by Friends for Life, the Corner, and OUTMemphis. Click here for Memphis appointments.

“If the scientific evidence supports the use of the different questions it could mean gay and bisexual men who present to donate would be assessed based upon their own individual risk for HIV infection and not according to when their last sexual contact with another man occurred,” said Susan Stramer, vice president of scientific affairs, with the American Red Cross Biomedical Services. 

Participants will be financially compensated for their time. For more information click below. 

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: “I Remember” by The Crown Prince

Music Video Monday is dancing in the ruins.

Memphis musicians and filmmakers have been busy! We’ve been on the receiving end of an avalanche of good music videos lately. That’s good news for you: We’ll be bringing you bomb tracks for weeks to come.

One of the most accomplished visuals we’ve seen in a while is by Memphis rapper The Crown Prince. It shows the stylish MC in a reflective mood. “My song ‘I Remember’ is about the struggles of being down in life and coming up on top,” he says.

CP created the video with his video partner Camera Mane. They visit a graveyard and dance in a ruined building with a beautiful ballerina in black, all the while looking absolutely impeccable.

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
CannaBeat

That New TN Marijuana Bill Does Not Mean Much

Yes, a Tennessee politician filed a marijuana question for the 2022 elections. No, it doesn’t mean much. 

Rep. Bruce Griffey (R-Paris) filed legislation recently that will ask Tennesseans what they think about legalizing marijuana. But this is not a ballot initiative; it’s a poll. It’s non-binding, which means that if every single Tennessean votes “yes,” nothing happens. 

Griffey’s legislation would put these three questions on the 2022 ballot:

• Should the state of Tennessee legalize medical marijuana? (Yes or no)

• Should the state of Tennessee decriminalize possession of less than one ounce of marijuana? (Yes or no)

• Should the state of Tennessee legalize and regulate commercial sales of recreational-use marijuana? (Yes or no)

Should the questions end up on ballots here, the results would be compiled by the Tennessee Secretary of State and given to the member of the Tennessee General Assembly. That’s it. 

The non-binding nature of the poll (poll, remember? Not a ballot initiative) brought criticism of Griffey’s move. 

Rep. Johnny Ray Clemmons (D-Nashville) tweeted that the move lacked “courage.”

Ballot initiatives are questions on laws put directly to voters of states during an election. The law becomes what the voters picked. Ballot initiatives allowed marijuana sales in Arkansas and Mississippi. Ballot initiatives are not allowed in Tennessee. 

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Black Widow: Super-Sisters Doing It for Themselves

Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanov in Black Widow.

First of all, Black Widow should have happened five years ago. It took eleven years — from Iron Man in 2008 to Captain Marvel in 2019 — for Disney super-producer Kevin Feige’s Marvel Cinematic Universe to make a solo super-movie starring a female superhero. In the interim, Warner Brothers filled the void with 2017’s Wonder Woman, the only good movie made from a DC property in a decade. 

Considering how aggressively mediocre Captain Marvel was, it’s especially galling that it took so long for Scarlett Johansson to get her own starring vehicle as Natasha Romanoff From a character standpoint, Natasha is the most interesting of the Marvel A-team. Trauma has always inflected the best superhero origin stories. (Did you know Batman’s parents were murdered in front of him? Someone should put that in a movie.) She was trained from childhood to be an elite assassin and intelligence operative by the Red Room, a secret Soviet super-soldier program notorious for its brutal methods. Somehow, the stone cold killer’s conscience survived the ordeal, and she defected to S.H.I.E.L.D., where she became Nick Fury’s most trusted confidant. Alone among the Avengers as a non-super-powered (albeit surgically enhanced and relentlessly conditioned) human, she feels pain when she gets hit. Thor the space god is cool, but he’s one-note. Natasha’s adamantium-tough exterior hides a broken person, deprived of human connection, riven with guilt for all the “red on my ledger,” trying to balance the books with world-saving good deeds. But she’s always gotten short shrift. During The Avengers iconic Battle of New York, the prototype for all the Marvel Third Acts to come, Black Widow was fighting flying, laser-firing aliens while armed only with a pair of pistols. Couldn’t S.H.I.E.L.D. at least get her an assault rifle? 

Natasha’s emotional potential is realized in Black Widow’s unexpectedly moving cold open. It’s 1995, and she’s living in suburban Ohio with her mother Melina (Rachel Weisz) and sister Yelena (played as a 6-year-old by Violet McGraw). Just as they’re about to sit down for an ordinary, wholesome family dinner, father Alexei (David Harbour) comes home with bad news. Turns out, the family are deep-cover spies, and their cover’s been blown. As the fake family rushes to get to the escape plane to take them to Cuba, Natasha stares longingly out the window, saying a silent goodbye to the closest thing to a normal life and human connection she will ever have. Her family may be fake, but it felt real to her.

Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh as super-sisters Natasha and Yelena in Black Widow.

Fast forward to 2016. (The film itself recognizes that it’s late. Natasha died in Avengers: Endgame, so Black Widow’s story takes place while she was on the lam after the events of Captain America: Civil War.) Yelena (played as an adult by Florence Pugh) is hunting a target who turns out to be another member of the Black Widow program. After Yelena strikes a mortal blow, the dying Widow exposes her to a red gas that undoes the chemical mind control regime the Red Room has imposed on her. Yelena goes rogue, stealing the remaining doses of Widow antidote, and sending them to her estranged, faux-sister Natasha for safekeeping. Instead of spending her downtime watching Moonraker — naturally, Natasha’s an obsessive James Bond fan — she decides to track down Yelena, and the pair team up to kill the Red Room mastermind Dreykov (Ray Winstone) and dismantle the Widow program once and for all. 

With director Cate Shortland at the helm, Black Widow is the best superhero picture since Black Panther. It’s not just an acceptably entertaining Marvel product, but an actual good film in its own right. The second-act action set piece, when Natasha and Yelena break their pretend-father Alexei out of a Siberian prison, stands with the airport brawl from Civil War as an all-time, kinetic highlight of comic book cinema. 

David Harbour as Red Guardian

It’s Johansson’s movie (she’s executive producer), but she leads an ensemble cast. Natasha’s been making life-or-death decisions since she was a teenager, so Johansson plays her with a deep world-weariness. She has zero time for petty bullshit; in 2021, I find Natasha’s emotional exhaustion extremely relatable. Pugh is her kid-sister foil, knowing exactly where to needle to get a rise out of the ice queen. The comic relief is left up to Harbour as the Red Guardian, Captain America’s Soviet counterpart gone to seed, still bitter about losing the ideological struggle with the West. 

Black Widow’s ideology is overtly feminist. It’s a quintessential female gaze movie. The women are sexy, but not subject to a leering camera; the men are either buffoons or sniveling abusers. The stakes and scale are remarkably restrained by Marvel standards. Natasha, a subject of unthinkable patriarchal abuse, is fighting to give other victims the kind of agency she was denied. Left to her own devices, Black Widow doesn’t choose to save the world from xenocidal aliens. Her heroism serves a more practical, down-to-earth purpose. 

Categories
News News Blog

Judge Issues Injunction Against Anti-Trans Bathroom Law

(Credit: Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash)

A federal judge blocked a new Tennessee law that would require business owners who allow transgender people to use the public bathroom that matches their gender to post a warning sign. 

The lawsuit asserts that the law violates the First Amendment and requests that the judge issue a preliminary injunction to prevent the law from being enforced while the lawsuit proceeds.

The seemingly short-lived law, which passed in April and went into effect on July 1st, requires that any “public or private entity or business that operates a building or facility open to the general public and that, as a matter of formal or informal policy, allows a member of either biological sex to use any public restroom within the building or facility shall post notice of the policy at the entrance of each public restroom in the building or facility.”

On June 25th, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Tennessee and the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the bill on behalf of Tennessee business owners Kyle Sayers, owner of Sactuary in Chattanooga, and Bob Bernstein, owner of Fido in Nashville. 

The injunction was issued, with the decision reading, “The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits; if they are not granted a preliminary injunction now, they will be harmed in a way that cannot be repaired; and requiring the State of Tennessee to abide by the U.S. Constitution, sooner rather than later, vindicates the public interest in rule by law and the acceptance, by States, of constitutional government. The court, therefore, has little difficulty concluding that the preliminary injunction should issue.”

Alongside a helping of legal jargon, the court documents for the case showcase some pointedly barbed comments, including this one: “Why did the General Assembly adopt the Act, more than two centuries into the State’s existence and after seemingly many decades of public restrooms being commonplace in Tennessee, and in America, without the need for such signage? The court, of course, cannot purport to know all of the dynamics that go into each legislator’s individual decision to support a bill.”

The law’s sponsor, Representative Tim Rudd, does not exactly look like the exemplar of fact-based legislation. The documents state he was “concerned” that some “hypothetical sexual predators” would “take advantage of” some public restroom policies to “assault or rape” other restroom users.

The exchange continues: “Shortly before that declaration, Rudd was asked by Tennessee House Speaker Pro Tempore Pat Marsh whether the State was ‘having a problem with this now, that you know of . . . anywhere.’ Rudd was unable to provide any examples or evidence of such a problem.”