Travesty

 "Our children are our future," says the cliche, so it follows that they constitute a whole front in the forever culture wars.  Everyone wants to save them; the question is how and from what.

  

American children must negotiate any number of obstacles and challenges, many of them preventable -- heavy metals in tap water, parents who don't believe in immunization, and the ever-present possibility of being shot to pieces during Show and Tell.  So what is Texas, site of the Uvalde massacre, planning to ban for their protection?  Stop drinking that coffee if you value your keyboard.

Drag shows.

"We need to let children be children...we need to stop trying to change the gender of children.  And we need to stop these shows in front of children," says state rep Bryan Slaton, who is either a grandmaster of projection or a sick, dumb asshole.  He's not talking about La cage aux folles, he's after events like Drag Queen Story Hour at the public library.  Small children love it.  There is of course zero evidence that it changes either their gender or their orientation, since the average four-year-old is thinking about neither.  DQSH has been around for seven years and no one has demanded reassignment surgery as a result of hearing a man in a dress and a wig read Cinderella.  Why does Bryan Slaton hate children?

He may or may not, but he's flailing about for some way to muffle the calls for saner gun laws by pretending that there are worse things than a bullet in a child's face.  Of course, he's not alone.  His whole party loves the murder lobby like it's a KGB hood turned fascist dictator.  Pretending drag is worse than homicide dovetails nicely with Republicans' anti-LGBTQ/pro AR-15 agenda.  In a season when "groomer" has replaced "radicaliberal" as a term of abuse, expect a lot more of this.  For instance:

Raleigh has cancelled DQSH from this year's Pride Festival, citing threats of violence.  Probably inspired by

Newsmax knuckle-dragger Greg Kelly's call to police or somebody over a video of children at a Dallas drag show, where John Doyle terrorized a family as they were leaving.  They're part of the "Christian fascist" movement that has descended on Texas like mosquitos.  Of course in 

Florida it's illegal for a teacher to use the word "gay" because in Florida it's 1958.  

The UK is imitating us in so many terrible ways, from neo-isolationism to immigrant-bashing to making a TV buffoon the head of the government, but it's unlikely they'll follow this path in any significant way.  That's because of the Christmas panto tradition, with men playing women, women playing men, people playing animals and the whole raucous spirit of commedia del'arte.  Parents take their kids and nobody screams at them on the pavement, not even the demented Democratic Unionists of Northern Ireland.

We have traditions, too, like freedom of the press.  That's why no one will try to censor, "cancel" or burn Kash Patel's The Plot Against the King, a children's book about poor King Donald and the evil Hillary Queenton.  It's too much fun to laugh at it.  Trump's would-be deputy CIA director decided kids need to learn the real true facts about the Steele dossier, long an obsession of the Harry Potter set.  They'll enjoy identifying the real people behind characters like Keeper Komey and "the shifty knight."  The illustrations may help.  Trump blew the dust off Truth Social, his ersatz Twitter platform, to urge that this "amazing book" be placed in every school in America, right next to the panic button.  (Who read it to him?)  Find it wherever Brave [sic] Books are sold.  

And now we can never again mock Bush for continuing to read The Pet Goat while the towers crumbled.