Rhea County seeks law to ban gays
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Rhea County commissioners voted unanimously to ask state lawmakers to introduce legislation amending Tennessee’s criminal code so the county can charge homosexuals with crimes against nature.
“We need to keep them out of here,” said Commissioner J.C. Fugate, who introduced the motion.
County Attorney Gary Fritts also was asked by Fugate to find the best way to enact a local law banning homosexuals from living in Rhea County. Commissioners asked Fritts to bring a resolution requesting the ban to next month’s commission meeting for another vote.
Fugate said he offered the crimes against nature measure, which wasn’t on the agenda, because of the recent national debate over gay marriages.
There was little discussion before the 8-0 vote, and commissioners didn’t mention that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Texas sodomy laws last year and ruled there is a constitutionally protected right to adults’ private sexual conduct.
Matt Nevels, president of the Chattanooga chapter of Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, said he knows of homosexuals and their parents in Rhea County.
“That is the most farfetched idea put forth by any kind of public official,” Nevels said. “I’m outraged.”
Fugate’s motion prompted some people in the audience to applaud. Three audience members who spoke before Fugate’s motion advocated prayer in schools and denounced drinking alcohol and county zoning.
Rhea County, about 30 miles north of Chattanooga, is among the most conservative in Tennessee. It holds an annual festival commemorating the 1925 trial that convicted John T. Scopes on charges of teaching evolution, a verdict thrown out by the Tennessee Supreme Court on a technicality. The trial later became the subject of the play and movie, “Inherit the Wind.”
In 2002, a federal judge ruled unconstitutional the Rhea County school board’s Bible Education Ministry, a class taught in the public schools by students from a Christian college.