Believe it or Not: One Day Drag Queen Story Hour Will Be a Drag

Believe it or not, there will come a time when it will be a drag to be dragged by mum and dad – or mum and mum – or dad and dad, or dad and dad and mum, or (you get the picture) to the local library and watch a camp man in sparkly, erotic women’s clothing read sexualised books to five year olds.

There’ll come a time when an eager self-identifying mum, full of creative dinner ideas that will keep her kids healthy, and a front-verge spinach garden, will have to drag her five year old to such an event.

It will be all “Aww mum, do we have to?” It will be like the times we had to go to the library when we were young and choose four books that would be “educational” as well as “uplifting”. Drag Queen Story Hour at the local library will be as wholesome as eating your greens. Or choosing your gender at ten and having your breasts cut off.Yes the time will come when it will be a drag to go to the Drag Queen Story Hour at the local library.

But that time has not come yet.

And the reason that that time has not come yet is that we have not yet hit peak “The Sexular Age”. Or bottomed out. Whichever seems more applicable. And in a culture in which the Victorian State Parliament hosts a Drag Queen Story Hour for all of those poor children (ore more to the point, parents) who didn’t get their drag queen fix because of protests outside libraries, it would seem we have some way to go. Some way to go before a drag queen event at a library, in which young children are read books about gay pride is something of a yawn.

The Premier of Victoria, Dan Andrews – never one to let a politically progressive posture go unnoticed -, invited drag queens to come to the safe confines of Parliament House to avoid those who, The Age newspaper referred to as not only hard-right and “Nazis”. Meaning ordinary parents I presume.

And here is the good Premier looking full of, er, pride in his achievement. Tickled pink even. Oooh-er. The same Premier who has demanded that Christian organisations not even be permitted to pray with a sexually confused teenager lest they be involved in conversion therapy.

Of course The Age was at pains to explain that it wasn’t just those horrid Nazis who are opposed to such stunts.

After weeks of headlines about such events at local libraries being cancelled owing to abuse and threats from those who oppose the events – including, but not limited to, far-right and fringe conspiracy groups – the government quietly invited five performers caught up in the cancellations to speak at “the safest place in Victoria, the parliament itself”.

Notice that? “Not limited to”! There are actually some people out there, posing as decent, honest citizens who are not Neo-Nazis, and who wouldn’t know a right-wing nut-job if his YouTube account was open in front of them, but who nevertheless have recalcitrant views around such matters.

Now of course, let’s abhor abuse and threats. Let’s always abhor that. And in fact, I think there’s a sense in which giving people over to their derelictions is what we might need to do. I mean, it’s not like there’s a woke, progressive parent heading off to Drag Queen Story Hour thinking “Well those protests might convince me otherwise!” In a sense that ship has sailed for that coterie.

No, Christians should not be shocked by this, merely sobered and saddened that people who are looking for freedom are going to be further enslaved. The Sexular Age is one gigantic, philosophical Chinese finger trap. It’s almost impossible to back out. Almost, but not totally, because the gospel can – and will – move in the lives of people who think their bondage (gear) is their freedom.

But I also won’t hear nonsense, as I have when I posted this on my Facebook page,

…that it was such a pity that my children were too old to attend this event, not being in the aged 2-8 category for which this event in Perth is recommended.

One Christian commenter countered by saying that it’s a total crock to think that there is anything wrong with such matters, as if it were all just a bit of feather-boa fun and dress ups. Well perhaps. If the books being read were the modern day equivalent of “Alexander and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”

But it’s not, is it? It’s this:

Ah, good old Pride. I guess though, Alexander’s day was so bad, and his mother was so objectifyingly a stay-at-home mum whose only time in the office was when they went to visit dad, that there are way too many trigger moments for young hearts in such a text (I never did understand though why Alexander wasn’t happy with just plain white hi-top sneakers, they’re all the rage now).

Of course the gender agenda, whilst denied by the likes of Victoria’s Parliamentarians, is front and centre of this movement, as Murray Campbell noted in his blog post on this matter. As Campbell observes, quoting University of Melbourne theatre teachers who, writing for the online The Conversation, insist that the aim of drag for kids is precisely to blur gender distinctions.

“The way drag asks us to question the socially constructed nature of gender offers children a vision of self-determination. You can do what you want to do, you can be who you want to be.”

Setting us up for a wonderful new world. Or a brave new world. Or a Brave New World. It’s sheer denial to think that drag is somehow an updated version of Barry Humphries/Dame Edna Everage throwing gladioli to the crowds at one of his shows. But all comedians aside, this is not funny. It’s a clear and implacable bulldozing of our culture in one direction only.

But as I said, no one is dragging these parents to such shows. They’re lapping it up. And speaking of lapping; a recent TikTok video showed a full-drag show with a child barely out of nappies twerking to the more raunchy bits, bum out to the crowd who were hooting and hollering. As I said, this Sexular Age hasn’t bottomed out yet.

So as Christians? What for us? Well we can’t get into the abuse and vitriol being spat at such things online. Though we can voice our opinion. And we should. We should be brave enough to point it out to the powers-that-be who, if the Sexular Age does come crashing down, many will be busy trying to scrub their internet histories or their iCloud photos, or their built-in-remote-what-evers that we will all be mainlining in the future.

What won’t do is the oft-repeated, airily wave of the hand that I’ve been getting recently from some Christian leaders who are keeping their heads down “Oh, this hard ideological progressive thing is burning itself out.” As if somehow a forest fire just burns itself out, or at least if we ignore it it will.

The fact is that forest fires don’t burn themselves out. Firefighters get scorched and get burned by putting themselves on the line to halt the progress of the fire. And that is what is happening in this whole issue. The only reason that there is starting to be some pushback now against some of the extremes of the trans debate, is that a whole bunch of brave people decided to put on their firefighting equipment and go and take a scorching.

And many of them were not Christian. Many of them like JK Rowling, Kathleen Stock, and Abigail Shrier. These were frontline fire-fighters. And they got scorched. And for Christian leaders to go “Oh it will fizzle out!” does them a disservice. And it excuses their own lack of skin in the game.

And that’s not a demand that all Christian leaders go to the front-line blaze. But it is a call for all Christians to figure out where they are in the supply chain that keeps the water at the front line. Denial on social media that Drag Queen Story Hour is just a bit of harmless froth and giggle is throwing verbal fuel on the fire. It’s one thing not to help fight the fire, it’s another thing to stoke it.

The best comment I heard around the issues of sexualising children, was on John Anderson’s podcast Conversations. He hosted US writers and thinkers, Katy Faust and Stacy Manning, whose book Them Before Us is a takedown of the Sexual Revolution and its insistence that adults and their rights, trump the good of children. Have a listen to the episode.

I was out running as I was listening to it, and my heart warmed – and beat a little quicker – to hear both women say that, even though they don’t like falling out with people who they had considered friends, and even though they don’t like conflict, some things are more important than the opinion of other people. Christians would do well to decide now if they like to be liked. Or in other words do they prefer the glory that comes from humans or the glory that comes from God.

It’s interesting how I’ve quoted the names of quite a few of the women fire-fighters. Where are the men, apart from those dressed in drag, or those dressed in dreary Parliamentary blue suits, beaming and nodding at the men in sparkles? Maybe we have reached peak feminism because all the men are in dresses and all the women are firefighters.

And then there’s that saddest of all men in the mix. The “leader” of the Victorian Liberal Party, John Pesutto, who is all so strong when it comes to a take down of a woman (Moira Deeming), but all so eager to celebrate men in dresses. He’s a flat track bully if ever there were one. He didn’t attend, but not because he didn’t want to, oh no!

Here’s The Age assuring us that both sides of the House are on board:

Opposition Leader John Pesutto was not invited to the reading at parliament, but said, had he known about it, he would have attended.

“Had I had the opportunity to know about it, I would have gone up and said hello,” he said.

“It’s their [the drag performers] house. It’s everybody’s house. I love everybody. And this is everybody’s house. Everybody should feel welcome in the Victorian parliament.”

He loves everybody. Except Moira Deeming I suspect.

But who knows? Maybe he was invited. He seems so lost these days he probably just wandered down the wrong corridor of Parliament and ended up in a janitor’s office, and mistook the cobweb duster for a feather boa.