The radical left lies to protect its agenda. And right now the agenda is to destroy the innocence of children and mutilate their bodies. Leftists dub efforts to remove pornographic books from school libraries as censorship. They falsely claim that transitioning children is “life-saving,” even though it is not. They falsely claim that transgender students are being restricted from playing sports even though they are not.
And now they’re claiming that conservatives want a blanket ban on drag shows, even though they don’t.
Last week, CNN published an article celebrating the “rich drag history” of the United States and why attempts to “restrict it” won’t work. Yet the article manages to prove the opposite point.
According to the article, drag has been a part of human culture for a long time, as people have challenged gender norms and conventions throughout history. “As long as people have been using clothes or marking gender in different ways, you’ve had people transgressing and challenging those conventions,” Larry La Fountain-Stokes, a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, told CNN. Harlem, the article explains, is considered the birthplace of drag balls in the 1860s. William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved man, is one of the first known people to call himself a “queen of drag.” In the early 20th century, drag performers were popular stars of the vaudeville scene. Julian Eltinge was a famous “female impersonator” who even launched his own makeup line and published a magazine.
Related: Unmasking the Transgender Movement’s Deceit in the Sports Debate
I’m going to assume that the author gets the history generally correct, save for his efforts to retcon transgenderism into drag’s early history. That said, the longevity of drag as a popular subculture tells us that for the most part, drag shows haven’t been incredibly controversial. In the 1990s, for example, RuPaul made drag rather mainstream by having hit albums, scoring several acting gigs, and hosting his own talk show on VH1. His success has been sustained for decades.
And for even longer, men dressing up as women for entertainment purposes wasn’t controversial. Movies like Some Like It Hot (1959), Tootsie (1982), and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) were box office hits. It was understood that the male leads of the films were dressing up as women for the comedic purposes of the story. The latter was a family-friendly comedy that would probably be considered transphobic by today’s standards (if you’ve seen it, you know why) and not the same thing as burlesque drag shows that some states are seeking to keep children away from.
The reason why drag shows have only become a wedge political issue is that, up until recently, it has been understood that risqué drag shows were for adults. At some point in recent years, the LGBT movement decided to lump drag performers under the transgender umbrella and use them as vessels to promote LGBT propaganda to young children. When the LGBT crowd started exposing children to these shows, allowing men in dresses to be sexually suggestive and inappropriate in front of innocent children under the guise of “tolerance” and “acceptance” is when it became an issue meriting the government to step in and protect children.
The current controversies regarding drag shows are not simply due to conservatives suddenly deeming them immoral. Instead, the left is using drag shows and drag culture as a means of grooming children, which has raised concerns among many conservatives and parents. These allegations are particularly troubling as they could potentially impact children’s development and overall welfare.
CNN further attempts to claim that exposing children to drag shows doesn’t harm them or sexualize them in any way, yet video evidence of children being exposed to lewd behavior at so-called family-friendly drag shows debunks these claims. That’s why efforts to protect children from drag shows won’t stop and why drag show culture has damaged itself by taking things too far.
