This Week in Barrel Scraping: Flags Down in Tennessee
A law in Tennessee banned flying flags other than the American flag and the state flag. Then they decided, no, some flags are OK. Just none of these gay flags, you hear?
by Alyssa Steinsiek
You may not know this, but I was born and raised away down south, in the land of traitors, crocodiles, and alligators, where they hates the constitution and this great republic too. That’s right, I am definitionally a Tennessean, much as it pains me to admit! I grew up rural and went to a public school with less than a thousand students, and let me tell y’all, we loves us some flags in Tennessee!
Well… some flags, anyway.
As it turns out, not all flags are appreciated in Dixie!
Back in November of last year and January of this year, the House and Senate in Tennessee respectively filed House Bill 1605 and Senate Bill 1722, joint measures meant to ban from public schools, charter schools and Local Education Agencies any flag besides the American flag and the state flag of Tennessee.
Representative Gino Bulso sponsored the House Bill, and State Senator Joey Hensley sponsored the Senate Bill. Why don’t we take a gander at other important bills Bulso and Hensley have sponsored, just to get an idea of why they might be happy to ban “political” flags—barring the political flags they like, anyway—from Tennessee schools.
Bulso recently sponsored House Bill 1632, which allows parents and students to sue educational institutions for violating the Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022, an act which mandated the cataloging of “inappropriate” material in Tennessee school libraries. Do we really need to ask what sort of material these people consider inappropriate?
In addition, Bulso is involved in a lawsuit regarding the 2022 act that clearly makes his sponsoring of House Bill 1632 an ethical violation. And is anybody surprised to see Moms for Liberty, an anti-LGBTQ+ student far-right organization, involved in this fight?
Hensley’s recent record is less contentious, though it’s no shock to find he sponsored Senate Joint Resolution 0870 “expressing support for the state of Israel.” If you’re unaware, evangelical Christians—that is, most Tennesseans—so strongly support Israel because they believe it is integral to the rapture.
So there’s that.
Now, the cherry on top for the flag banning bills is that, of course, they had to amend the bill. In their haste to ensure that absolutely no queer iconography can be seen by children in their state, Tennessee Republicans forgot that there are flags besides the American and state flags that they absolutely love!
House Amendment 0544 amends HB1605 such that a few extra flags are considered kosher for Tennessee schools. These include POW/MIA flags, flags that “[represent] an Indian tribe,” flags for city/county/metro governments, and armed forces flags, among others.
So, POW/MIA and armed forces flags were a common enough sight in the Tennessee public school I attended when I was but a wee babe. You know what wasn’t? Flags for indigenous American tribes. Do you know why? Why, it’s because there are no federally recognized indigenous tribes in the state of Tennessee. That land once belonged to the Quapaw, Chickasaw, Shawnee, Koasati, Yuchi, and Cherokee nations, until the state and federal governments genocided and/or removed them to Oklahoma.
Every country cracker you meet in Tennessee, white as the driven snow, will tell you they’re “part Cherokee,” but I promise you they are lying. So that little caveat feels just a bit disingenuous to me!
In addition to those exemptions to the new law, HA0544 explicitly states that the bill will become enforceable immediately upon approval, meaning it will almost certainly be rule of law soon.
And those exemptions make it very clear that the law will target almost exclusively LGBTQ+ pride flags, because I promise you they’ll still be flying the vile Stars and Bars that were a near constant of my childhood. A reminder of a horrific period of American history, chattel slavery and the Civil War, and a very clear message that those times ain’t over yet.
So I fucking weep for every queer kid who, like I was, is now trapped in a state that despises them. It isn’t just Tennessee, of course; most of Appalachia has bought into the tidal wave of bigoted nonsense that’s been drowning the nation for nearly a decade now. And most liberals are happy to joke about walling off the south like Escape From New York, ignoring the blatant truth that there are millions of queer people and/or people of color suffering in that region with absolutely no recourse available to them.
So say a prayer or devote some cosmic energy to every gay and trans kid in Tennessee tonight. They’re about to need it.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer and video games nerd who hails from Appalachia but lives, laughs, loves in Rapid City.