Are the Real Threats to America’s Kids. Drag Shows Are Not.
BY Danielle Moodie Published Feb. 13, 2023 3:58AM ET
MY Note: Today is the fifth anniversary of he Parkland Florida school massacre that claimed 17 lives. What has changed (and what hasn’t)
It’s time for Democrats to fight against the white evangelical GOP agenda that claims to be “for the children,” but which endangers their mental health and physical safety.
In no other community has this happened with such speed in modern times than within the LGBTQ+ community—a community which intersects with every other group under the sun.
But white evangelicals, masquerading as adults who are merely concerned about the welfare of children, rain rage and fury onto the LGBTQ+ community by slandering queer teachers as pedophiles or groomers. These false accusations are as old as time, but were used in the mid-20th century to pass legislation outlawing queer people from adopting, teaching, and connecting with youth. All of this was orchestrated under the guise of “protecting the children.”
LQBTQ+ individuals around the country started broadly winning more basic civil rights by the late 1980s—such as legal protections against housing and employment discrimination. But after three decades of progress, this country is backsliding into bigotry. And, once again, it’s predicated on fear and lies.
Legislation is now making its way across red states—banning queer history, forcing gay teachers to deny their own identities, and targeting transgender youth. At least nine GOP-led states have authored legislation to criminalize parents, bars, and other establishments that allow drag shows to have children in attendance.
All of this is to prevent the “indoctrination” of children to believe that love is love, gender is a construct, and that children have the power to command being treated with dignity and respect regardless of what they look like, who they love, and whether they fall into the binary or outside of it.
The authenticity of “other” Americans scares the hell out of white evangelicals that have made their lives about conformity and self-oppression. “I have suppressed my desires and authentic self so why can’t you?” is essentially their argument. The difference, however, between this time and last century—when Black and queer Americans were fighting for liberation—is that there wasn’t an actual assault happening every few months on children.
Why?
Perhaps forcing them to army crawl before they learn their ABCs—or living in terror that their school will be the next one with a body count in the headlines—has a little something to do with it?
What the children don’t need to fear are harmless drag performers creating a world of imagination, Black history AP classes or the centering of other people’s American stories and experience.
It's the proliferation of guns—and the supposed adults in the room creating a problem where one doesn’t exist, rather than supporting sensible gun regulation—that are major sources of children’s anxieties.
It’s past time for Democrats to fight back the way the Black and queer liberators did 50+ years ago. It’s time for a course correction that shows what is actually harming our kids. And it’s time to place the blame where it belongs: on a Republican white evangelical ideology that forces our nation’s children to learn how to play dead in the event of an active shooter, and which bullies queer children back into a closet from which they already should have been liberated.
Children weren’t being held hostage by unrelenting gun violence and school shootings, which have become so normalized in America that there’s now a thriving market for bulletproof backpacks.
So, where are all those “caring adults'' when the children actually need them?
They’re banning books and protesting drag shows, while daring sensible politicians to “come and take” their precious guns.
There is, in fact, a real crisis in our country. More children are on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications than ever before. More children are attempting suicide.
Why?
Perhaps forcing them to army crawl before they learn their ABCs—or living in terror that their school will be the next one with a body count in the headlines—has a little something to do with it?
What the children don’t need to fear are harmless drag performers creating a world of imagination, Black history AP classes or the centering of other people’s American stories and experience.
It's the proliferation of guns—and the supposed adults in the room creating a problem where one doesn’t exist, rather than supporting sensible gun regulation—that are major sources of children’s anxieties.
It’s past time for Democrats to fight back the way the Black and queer liberators did 50+ years ago. It’s time for a course correction that shows what is actually harming our kids.
And it’s time to place the blame where it belongs: on a Republican white evangelical ideology that forces our nation’s children to learn how to play dead in the event of an active shooter, and which bullies queer children back into a closet from which they already should have been liberated.
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