cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/8210190
In March, West Texas A&M University President Walter Wendler canceled a student drag show organized by several campus student clubs including members of the Secular Student Alliance.
In an email to all students, faculty, and staff, President Wendler cited his personal religious beliefs and evoked God and Creator multiple times in his justification for canceling the student event. He also falsely likened drag to blackface, claiming that the art form is misogynistic, divisive, and void of human dignity.
President Wendler’s personal religious beliefs and biblical references have no place in justifying the cancellation of the event. West Texas A&M University is a public institution and the wall of the separation of state and church remains standing.
Last week, Andrew Seidel, a constitutional lawyer and vice president of strategic communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, visited West Texas A&M University to give an address to support the students suing President Wendler, demonstrate that drag is not threatening, and detail the dangers of Christian Nationalism.
Andrew explained that drag shouldn’t be a concern for anyone: “Drag is art. Drag is human. Drag is beautiful.” However for religious conservatives, anything that calls into question the gender binary or the conservative Christian idea of what men ought to look like is perceived as a threat – solely because of their religious beliefs.
A public university president using personal religious beliefs to justify any decision should be fired immediately.
It’s interesting that modern drag shows have been a thing for one hundred years without too much pearl clutching from conservatives until 2022. Gee, it’s as if this is a wholly manufactured issue by the GOP to get their bigoted base riled up.
Conservatives: “But I ain’t never heard anybody talking about it so much before!”
Yeah, and surely that’s not due to propaganda…
“They kept it to themselves back then”
Conservatives are happy to “tolerate” other beliefs and ways of living provided that everyone acknowledges that they’re the default, “normal” ones.
Teaching kids that there are other ways to live than as a repressed homophobe is anathema to them.
It’s because for all that time they could spew vitriol about and even physically harm drag queens and none of their peers batted an eye, many even joined in. Nowadays it’s accepted and even popular. Conservative Christians are seeing themselves and their values become the minority and it scares the living shit out of them.
Depends on where you are talking about 1930’s German “conservatives” threw quite a stink about drag shows and queer caberets right before they started raiding establishments and violently purging their own ranks of anyone whom the gossip chain cited as potentially queer.
Always remember that Hitler killed his gay bestie.
Depends on where you are talking about
Well, this is a community about U.S. politics and I’m replying to an article about Texas and specifically mentioned the GOP. Those are some pretty clear context clues.
Yup, but queer and minority persecution has been tied to conservative and authoritarian politics world round over the past 100 years and it isn’t even America’s first go round. McCarthy’s lavender scare sought to tar queer communities with the same brush as communists. Prohibition era Christian Temprance Union policies hit the queer communities by design. They used to hold police raids regularly of queer clubs which were often owned by the same criminal syndicates who were rum running. Those links ran deep. Stonewall was owned by the mob who saw the need for underground spaces to charge protection money, utilize the informants to give heads up before a raid and charge exorbitant prices just so you could slowdance in public… Other queer establishments were raided as illicit all the time because if you were caught out in the street in drag it was a crime. The Stonewall riot did not take place on the first raid. Fuck, it wasn’t even the first raid that month.
Saying nobody cluched their pearls over drag shows in the past 100 years isn’t exactly truthful. American history is a lot uglier than that. Whenever a country gets scared and wants to dress itself up in Christian nationalism it’s meant queer persecution and genocide. America isn’t particularly special in that regard.
