In The War To Destroy Society, Drag Queens Are The Shock Troops
Category: History & Sociology
Via: hallux • last year • 19 commentsBy: PAULA RINEHART - The Federalist
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Drag queens pose as family-friendly, old-fashioned entertainment, but there’s a subversive ideology under the pink glitter and hairspray.
Drag queens appear everywhere now — public libraries, parades, and school classrooms. Even the signing celebration for President Joe Biden’s ill-named Respect for Marriage Act included a drag queen.
“Drag Queen Story Hour” is marketed as family-friendly entertainment you’d want to take your children to see. But the ideology behind drag queen culture merits a much deeper look. What used to be a common comedy sketch — men in drag — has become a vehicle for sexual politics that seeks to upend norms around human sexuality and the nuclear family. It’s important to grasp the dark intent behind this growing trend.
Drag queens are billed as a warm celebration of human differences. There are more than 30 chapters of drag queens in the United States seeking to introduce children to a new way of seeing sex and sexuality, often with readings in public libraries. As the Drag Queen Story Hour website explains, “In spaces like this kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where everyone can be their authentic selves.”
Journalist Christopher Rufo took a deep dive into what he calls “the real story” behind drag queen culture. We should think of drag queens, he says, as the footsoldiers for an ideology that deconstructs normative human experience, beginning with breaking the binary of male and female. In drag pedagogy, gender differences are invented categories that shackle good people to rigid stereotypes, instruments of oppression to be shattered.
Why the Push to Introduce Kids to Drag Queens?
Drag queens bust up these categories in people’s minds. Queer theory, once limited to the academy, found a ready medium in the form of drag queens. Gender theorist Gayle Rubin insisted in her landmark book “Deviations” that only very public and transgressive sex could liberate society from the oppression of gender. Drag queens became a medium with an underlying message.
We might nurse the hope that our children will get an education, find a husband or a wife, settle down and raise a family, contribute their talents to others. This has been the primary vision of human flourishing and the nexus of strong communities for centuries. It’s just this vision that drag pedagogy seeks to dismantle. The concept of “family” becomes just as fluid and moldable as that of “gender.”
Once society is liberated from traditional norms, then, supposedly, civilization can be rebuilt from the ground up. A new sort of goodness and equality will magically appear, one where gender and sexuality can be molded and fashioned according to individual desire.
Turn Taboos Upside Down
The image of a man in drag parading in a public library while holding the hand of a small child as he grabs his own crotch startles viewers. Drag performers such as Ru Paul have worked to soften the image of drag by toning down routines and pushing gender messaging to the background. But in the minds of ideologues, disruption is the point.
Drag pedagogy builds its justification on notions of “oppression.” How terribly unjust that married heterosexual couples are seen at the top of the sexual hierarchy, while unmarried and homosexual couples, and promiscuous gay men, followed by prostitutes and transsexuals slide sequentially down the rungs of social acceptance. Queer theory sets out to upend this sexual hierarchy and usher in a world without limits.
So old taboos must be made acceptable. What’s on the margins should be brought to the center of the stage. The assistant secretary for Human Health and Services needs to be a man seeking to pass as a woman. Male soldiers expected to fight in combat should also have access to female hormones, despite the weakening of their fighting capacities. Men and women can’t naturally prefer different things. That’s just an old trope. The recent hit movie “Enola Holmes” sports a 16-year-old girl set in Victorian England who, supposedly, wants to fist fight other women, as though a real woman has always wanted to fight like a man. In sexual politics, the goal is to break norms and taboos to serve an androgynous end.
Reconstruct Childhood Innocence
The most disturbing goal of drag queen culture is its determination to deconstruct childhood, robbing children of the innocence that protects their maturing process. Drag culture invades this protected space by pushing sexual content on children who, developmentally, would be baking cupcakes or playing soccer.
One of the first drag performers to popularize Drag Queen Story Hour was a college professor named Harris Kornstein, aka “Lil Miss Hot Mess,” who read his book, “The Hips on a Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish” to children’s groups. Kornstein, along with queer theorist Harper Keenan, wrote the go-to treatise on drag pedagogy , in which they explain that the goal of drag culture is to stimulate a queer imagination in kids by bringing “queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children.” Drag is a useful tool in “reformulating children’s relationship with sex, sexuality, and eroticism.”
Healthy adults consider childhood nearly sacrosanct, a time for climbing trees, piano lessons, and neighborhood friends. Children are neither hormonally nor psychologically inclined to explore their sexuality. They don’t naturally worry if they are “nonbinary.” They must be primed, stimulated, dragged in that direction. When a child can’t rest in the pleasure of being a boy or a girl, when the foundations of being are deliberately shaken, is it any wonder so many kids are overwhelmed, anxious, and depressed ?
Underneath the effort to deconstruct the innocence of children is the fierce belief that one’s actual identity is at stake. Sexuality is seen as the seat of your desires, and those desires will lead to the unveiling of who you truly are. It’s life and death stuff. Or as Carl Trueman notes in his book “ The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self ,” if sexuality is the basis for identity then a person doesn’t just have gay sex, gay is who he is. This contrasts mightily with a classic Christian understanding of personhood in which your deepest identity transcends time and place: You belong to the God who created you male or female in His image.
So it might seem novel that a drag queen serves your brunch in Midtown Atlanta , or your public library hosts Drag Queen Story Hour for 5-year-olds. But this is not a neutral form of lively entertainment packed with diversity and feel-good moments.
As Rufo concludes , “This isn’t about ‘tolerance’ and ‘inclusion.’ It’s about adult activists using the goodwill surrounding gay and lesbian social movements as cover for advancing extreme left-wing ideologies and turning children into shock troops for their gender revolution.” There is, indeed, a method to the madness, an end goal being served. It’s time to question and confront the sexual politics behind the glitter and high heels.
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So, why did I seed this? To give an example of how insanely inane (and yes, dangerous) The Federalist is.
Nothing but whackjob bullshit and conspiracy theories nowadays,
What do you expect from a bunch of whack jobs all butt hurt about M&M's and a cartoon mascot (A&W) bear not wearing pants?
Can you say ‘cancel culture’? The hypocrisy would be laughable if not for pending legislation.
So what you seem to be saying is that this supposedly family friendly happy and healthy activity is appropriate for young children?
What's with the leftist need to sexualize kids with drag shows and "gender affirmation'?
Is this the new normal?
what's with the rwnj need to believe every wedge issue created by their fascist media machine?
Ask Rudy.
What's with the rights' need to see all things as sexual? Also gender affirmation has little to nothing to do with sexualization.
At one time people born left handed were called freaks and deviants. Nuns would bind their left arms down to train children to use the right hand. Redheads are about 2% of the population. Similar to LGBTQ+. For centuries there are stories of redheads associated with evil. From being witches, werewolves or vampires to spoiling the days fish catch. There are old Celtic alchemical texts directing the user to use the blood from a redhead to turn copper into gold. To this day there are places in Africa where redheads are still considered witches.
Lefthanded people, redheaded people and LGBTQ+ people have not torn away the fabric of reality nor will they cause the collapse of American communities. Putting restrictions on these people doesn't make them go away. Making them outcasts doesn't make the traditional family stronger either.
EDIT:
The only thing new is the increasing level of acceptance. This is what the author and their traditionalist reader are really objecting to. This isn't about protecting children it's about the balance of political power. IF they cared about children they'd support things that benefit children instead of calling them a waste of tax payer money.
Redheads are the reason Scotland is the land of brimstone.
Greg, I know you like "safe" checkboxes to fill-in on your daily life journey, and because of that drag queens may never get one (a filled-in checkbox), but using loaded words and phrases like, "family friend, "sexualizing kids" is a non-starter for you. Why? Because it demonstrates that you are not interested in a real, heartfelt, discussion when you 'open' with talking points only.
Be 'straight' with me, us: What is your personal issue with drag queens (I will know if you are sharing a talking point you picked up somewhere)?
Because drag queens are not required to live another individual's ideology for a lifetime just to be considered normal.
What the author calls "traditional" isn't as traditional or rigid as they would like the reader to believe and the traditional - black and white version of reality has never worked for everybody. What the LGBTQ+ community wants is acknowledgement they are worthy and deserving of the same respect the traditionists demand. The idea the are calling for "no limits" is absurd. By that same logic we should outlaw the clergy because of the number rogue podophile priests.
pedophile priests need to be hung from the rafters inside their churches and left up there until they rot and drop.
Start with the RCC and their clergy since they seem to be stuck in an never ending pedophile circle.
We can can pick almost any group in any society in any place or time and find where those in a position of power that have (or will) prey on those weaker. We'd have to ban letting children out of the house if this were as serious as these MAGA assclowns want us to believe.
The culture warriors....Making their own wars....
This is getting ridiculous.
Cobalt is right...
How in the hell is some drag queen sexualizing by wearing full clothes yet these same nutjob republicans will take their kids to a beach where people are wearing basically nothing but revealing underwear...
Always!
What the writer appears to be saying is drag queens are/have become mainstream like boy/girl/man/woman. There is nothing wrong with this. What is wrong with conservatives always having to have 'tidy' little boxes for people, flesh, bone, and mind, to be 'stuffed'?