Guns and Bigotry Are the Real Threats to America’s Kids. Drag Shows Are Not.

Many people thought once Donald Trump was out of the White House that Trumpism—the belief that white evangelical Americans are exclusively responsible for what makes America great, and that their greatness is being disregarded as the country’s demographics shift and ancient norms are challenged—would exit the stage in disgrace with him.

But such foolishly optimistic people grossly underestimated the disdain white evangelical Americans harbor for “the other.”

We’re Watching White Anxiety Turn Into Violent Rage

Democrats wanted to believe that white evangelicals were better than they are. They hoped that historic change—through the election of the nation’s first Black president and the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that nationalized marriage equality—was somehow going to erase this nation’s intertwined history of white domestic terrorism, from slavery to Jim Crow to the criminalization of LGBTQ Americans.

Instead, the dehumanization, criminalization, and erasure of Black people, Black culture, and Black history have made up the blueprint for every “other” group’s cultural expurgation from the mainstreams of society. Lies, stereotypes, hatred, and violence continue to push marginalized communities to the margins of society or, in the case of the LGBTQ+ community, back into the depths of the closet.

The civil rights movement and the LGBTQ+ liberation movements both began in earnest in the 1950s—following pushes for school integration, and an early gay rights group, the Mattachine Society, fighting against the U.S. Postal Services’ ban on a gay magazine. However, the 1960s is the decade that these human rights movements culminated in intensity. That’s because another wave of change was underfoot in this country—liberation from the constraints of white evangelical society’s norms, from free love to the anti-war movement to Black and queer liberation. America was at an inflection point, and those that had been wrestling under the boot of oppression had had enough.

But then, as now, there was backlash.

You see, there always comes a time in our “becoming” as a nation where the mainstream culture believes that we as a society are becoming a little too free. Where the tectonic shifts that are occurring in rapid succession are just too much for those whose power can only be maintained in the status quo. When Americans, young and old, begin to question what they have been socialized into believing is “the way”—and want to forge a new path.

In no other community has this happened with such speed in modern times than within the LGBTQ+ community—a community which intersects with every other group under the sun.

But white evangelicals, masquerading as adults who are merely concerned about the welfare of children, rain rage and fury onto the LGBTQ+ community by slandering queer teachers as pedophiles or groomers. These false accusations are as old as time, but were used in the mid-20th century to pass legislation outlawing queer people from adopting, teaching, and connecting with youth. All of this was orchestrated under the guise of “protecting the children.”

LQBTQ+ individuals around the country started broadly winning more basic civil rights by the late 1980s—such as legal protections against housing and employment discrimination. But after three decades of progress, this country is backsliding into bigotry. And, once again, it’s predicated on fear and lies.

Queer Kids Are Getting Blasted With Too Much Doom and Gloom

Legislation is now making its way across red states—banning queer history, forcing gay teachers to deny their own identities, and targeting transgender youth. At least nine GOP-led states have authored legislation to criminalize parents, bars, and other establishments that allow drag shows to have children in attendance.

All of this is to prevent the “indoctrination” of children to believe that love is love, gender is a construct, and that children have the power to command being treated with dignity and respect regardless of what they look like, who they love, and whether they fall into the binary or outside of it.

The authenticity of “other” Americans scares the hell out of white evangelicals that have made their lives about conformity and self-oppression. “I have suppressed my desires and authentic self so why can’t you?” is essentially their argument. The difference, however, between this time and last century—when Black and queer Americans were fighting for liberation—is that there wasn’t an actual assault happening every few months on children.

Children weren’t being held hostage by unrelenting gun violence and school shootings, which have become so normalized in America that there’s now a thriving market for bulletproof backpacks.

So, where are all those “caring adults'' when the children actually need them?

They’re banning books and protesting drag shows, while daring sensible politicians to “come and take” their precious guns.

There is, in fact, a real crisis in our country. More children are on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications than ever before. More children are attempting suicide.

Democrats Should Call Themselves What They Are: The Real Patriots

Why?

Perhaps forcing them to army crawl before they learn their ABCs—or living in terror that their school will be the next one with a body count in the headlines—has a little something to do with it?

What the children don’t need to fear are harmless drag performers creating a world of imagination, Black history AP classes or the centering of other people’s American stories and experience.

It's the proliferation of guns—and the supposed adults in the room creating a problem where one doesn’t exist, rather than supporting sensible gun regulation—that are major sources of children’s anxieties.

It’s past time for Democrats to fight back the way the Black and queer liberators did 50+ years ago. It’s time for a course correction that shows what is actually harming our kids. And it’s time to place the blame where it belongs: on a Republican white evangelical ideology that forces our nation’s children to learn how to play dead in the event of an active shooter, and which bullies queer children back into a closet from which they already should have been liberated.

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