Nashville Sex Club Masquerading As Church Under Fire Again

MADISON, TN — Metro Nashville codes inspectors have filed a complaint seeking to shut down The Social Club, a sex club that incorporated as a church in 2015 to thwart zoning laws. Two codes inspectors paid $40 to enter the club and vividly detailed what they saw inside.

When development began spreading through downtown, TSC left its long-time digs on Division Street near Eighth Avenue and bought a building on Lentz Drive in Madison, near the old Nashville Memorial Hospital and, importantly to Metro, less than 1,000 feet from Goodpasture Christian School. While sex clubs are legal in Davidson County, Metro's zoning ordinance only permits them in areas zoned industrial — with some restrictions, such as being more than 1,000 feet from a school, a proscription passed by the General Assembly when TSC announced its move to Madison — and the Lentz Drive property is zoned for office use.

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The owners of TSC, thus, came up with an ingenious solution: they said that the club is a church, chartering it under the name Freedom 4 All Inc. and saying the building would be used as a meeting place for the United Fellowship Center, a church which held no doctrinal beliefs beyond The Golden Rule (in the meantime, the building at 520 Lentz Drive was leased on occasion to more, ahem, traditional churches).

It seemed, though, that The Social Club/United Fellowship Center had stopped using its building and in fact listed it for sale in May 2016. On a recent visit, however, Metro Codes inspectors said the congregation was in full swing. So to speak.

According to affidavits filed with a request for an injunction, two codes inspectors visited 520 Lentz Drive around 9:20 p.m. March 25.

After briefly chatting with a man traveling through town on business who told them he found the club by Googling "Swingers Clubs in Nashville," the inspectors and other patrons were permitted to go into a previously restricted area, consisting of a dozen or so rooms, each with a bed or chaise longue. One of the rooms — labeled "choir" — included furniture with restraints and at least two others had "partial walls" which allowed for spectators to see what was going on inside.

The two codes inspectors reported numerous instances of sexual activity and, in fact, took cell phone photos of at least one couple engaging various activities (these photos were not included with the affidavits).

Metro Government is asking a General Sessions to permanently enjoin The Social Club from operating at Lentz Drive and to declare it a public nuisance. Throughout the process, TSC's long-time attorney, Larry Roberts, has asserted that by simply claiming to be a church, it was a church and that courts have routinely ruled in favor of religious groups even with idiosyncratic beliefs. Roberts, according to a 2015 Washington Post analysis, is overstating the permissiveness of the courts with regards to religious practice. One of the things courts examine in these sorts of cases — there have been instances, for example, of people saying that marijuana is an essential part of their faith — is whether the belief is long-standing or doctrinal. In the case of marijuana use, for instance, a Rastafarian was permitted to keep his pipe and pot, whereas a couple in New Mexico which simply claimed religion in an effort to dodge federal drug trafficking laws, lost on appeal, in which now-Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch said the couple was simply running a commercial enterprise with a religious front.

“In general, courts are very reluctant to question the validity of religious beliefs,” James Oleske, a law professor at Lewis and Clark, told the Post. “But they do ask if there really is a good-faith, religious belief that exists — that this isn’t a sham in order for people to get immunity for their secular practices.”

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