Let’s not deceive ourselves. The ideology behind Drag Queen Story Hour, seeks to undermine, overthrow, and replace the Founding vision of a moral and virtuous people governing themselves according to natural principles of morality and justice. By contrast, those pushing DQSH are working to establish a new regime built upon the lascivious desires of its erotically cultivated subjects, endlessly pursuing even greater depths of perversion and degeneracy. Pundits like David French and Paul Miller may think they are preserving peace, forestalling social conflict, and helping conservatives win religious liberty cases. Yet because of their confusion, they are de facto apostles for Drag Queen Story Hour and are actively helping to sanction its demonic progress. 

Though Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) events at local libraries are presented as innocuous, family-friendly gatherings that help elevate historically oppressed sexual minorities, their real purpose is deliberately subversive. “The drag queen might appear as a comic figure,” Chris Rufo writes in a recent expose in City Journal, “but he carries an utterly serious message: the deconstruction of sex, the reconstruction of child sexuality, and the subversion of middle-class family life.”

According to queer theory advocate Gayle Rubin, traditional concepts of sex and gender were mythologies constructed by powerful, heteronormative forces that sought to persecute those with non-conforming sexual orientations, explains Rufo. By combining a metaphysic that denied that sex, gender, and marriage were unchanging essences and an oppressor-oppressed binary, Rubin hoped to turn traditional sexual norms on their head. In her book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler continued Rubin’s postmodern project by adding the concept of performativity as a mechanism of social change. Once gender’s malleability was established by calling its very reality into question, gender performance through crossdressing, transvestitism, and transgenderism intentionally blurred the lines between the real and unreal, moral and immoral, acceptable and unacceptable.

Once drag ideology gained a foothold in the academy, drag advocates, according to Rufo, sought to rebrand drag performances as family-friendly, educational story hours in local libraries. But DQSH actually created a new childhood paideia: the stimulation of “queer imagination” among children that would teach them “queer ways of knowing and being” and disrupt the so-called oppressive bourgeois norms their parents had taught them. As Rufo explains, “the goal was not to reinforce the biological family but to facilitate the child’s transition into the ideological family.”

Drag Queen Story Hour seeks to destroy childhood innocence and introduce the most demonic forms of sexual perversion into public life: pedophilia, incest, bestiality, necrophilia, race fetishism, and prostitution.

The “Conservative” Case for Drag

Rufo’s journalistic endeavors help cast new light on the conservative kerfuffle over Drag Queen Story Hour. In a now infamous comment during a debate with Sohrab Ahmari, political commentator David French called DQSH “one of the blessings of liberty.” How did he propose handling DQSH going forward? By holding fast to “viewpoint neutrality,” a term stemming from twentieth century Supreme Court rulings that redefined prior free speech and obscenity jurisprudence. “Handle bad speech with better speech. Counter bad speakers in the marketplace of ideas, not through the heavy hand of government censorship,” said French. Yet Rufo’s revelation that DQSH is a brazen attempt to overthrow the foundations of the created order shows that French’s advice is naive at best. DQSH is the rotten fruit of licentiousness, the manifestation of a disordered conception of the public good and a sign of a weak government that no longer has the will to pursue good and punish evil.

Unfortunately, David French isn’t the only one to get hoodwinked into accepting liberal twentieth century Supreme Court rulings. In his recent book, The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism, Paul D. Miller calls for a qualified embrace of neutrality.

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