Okay, observation:
Since Chaos turned off the favorites, no one was able to favorite my new story. Since it has under 20 favorites, it's appearing on the main page.
Even with the favorites turned off I still have over 20 people favoriting (I know that's not a word, lol) the old stories and it's still doing the SQL error thing.
I'm thinking turning off favorites only stops new people from favoriting but keeps the old ones so any stories published before the turn-off are still going to have the issue.