There would seem to be a rage for drag queen events such as Drag Queen Story Time where Michelle Tea, in drag, tells stories to young people which tell them to be kind to people who are different and disclaim that the children aged three to eleven are not being groomed for sexual activities. And there are drag queen shows where families bring their children, though I don’t think I would have found that back then, but Republicans are supposed to believe that families should decide how they should conduct their children, but escorting children to drag shows was apparently a bridge too far. I do not know if such exhibitions have any impact on the children but the Republican Congress is outraged at the events, quizzing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at a committee hearing about whether they are taking place at military bases, he responding that no government money was being used, while avoiding the question of whether these events were facilitated by the military and whether soldiers retained the right to engage in free speech when off duty. Even so august a figure as a defense secretary goes out of his way to be as non confrontational as possible with Congresspeople lest he chide them for their grandstand plays, which is what I suspect they are. I sometimes wish witnesses at congressional hearings would talk back and call the Congresspeople outlandish and ridiculous rather than allow them to mouth off, always reclaiming their own time so as not to let witnesses answer the largely rhetorical questions. Ah well, the purpose of committees is, after all, to bloviate rather than develop information.
A suspicion that politicians are out to engage in false rather than true outrage, that theory are lambasting gays because that is a group their constituents think they will like to be picked on, is evidenced to me by the long ago time when Gerald Ford, then a Michigan congressman, tried to get Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to be impeached because he had included a serious article within the pages of “Playboy”, a way for Hugh Hefner to claim it was not just a magazine of girlie pictures. I remember on camera a colleague telling Ford not to expose the pictures that were next to the Douglas article because they were so raw, however outraged Ford might be inclined to do so. But I knew Ford had been a ballet dancer as well as a football player and so probably not a prude but just hypocritical, faux angry at what would later be called a cultural issue.
But what if the current politicians are as honest as they can be about being outraged at displays of drag queen theatrics, especially including children, is not only seen as a danger to the children but also to the moral fabric of the nation? I would think then that there had indeed become a sea change in morals in that this generation had become within conservative precincts to have become much more prudish about sex since, let us say, when women bobbed their hair and wore short skirts following the First World War. Consider a point in World War II when it seems men and women were copulating like crazy before men got shipped off to war. There was a film of 1941, just before that, called “All American Coed” starring Frances Langford about a slightly misspelled Princeton which included a drag team as part of its extracurricular activities showing off their skills, to comic effect, set to compete with an all female review of beauty queens out to strut their stuff as ringers employed by a girl college, a misspelled Bryn Mawr. Being in drag was good humored fun and children were allowed to see the movie because no qualitative ratings system had arrived. Would that movie today not be allowed? Is this today a serious enough issue on which to engage Congress?
Let us raise the ante and treat this as dealing with an issue about the morality of voting. An acquaintance of mine recently told me that she voted for the best candidate regardless of party which seemed to show that she was objective and therefore not swayed by political rhetoric. I certainly do require character and competence as bedrock or minimal standards for voting, though I remark that Republicans are more apt than Democrats to nominate questionable figures as their standard bearers. But there is also the question of the party agenda, its issues and programs, that are in a current election and persist over decades as their visions of the world. Stick to the party, I say, that has the point of view I espouse, and so be partisan. Sure, there are fringes of a party that I find I object to. After all, I came up with a party dominated by segregationists, though the Republicans were not very forward minded at the time on civil rights and that the squad of four, even though I disagree with Ilhan Omar and AOC on one or another of issues, these are serious people while Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Green are not, and though I disagree with some of the Democratic agenda which seem to me wrongheaded, such as with regard to climate change, on the whole I can endorse the Democratic view, while the Republican view is anathema, as in the present instant, sincere or not, as opposing gay and transgender groups, exhibiting a meanspiritedness not likely to earn my support, not a likely prospect, even should a more moderate standard bearer emerge. Republicans are rightly not looking to court my vote but to court the acquaintance of mine who will let and see the qualities of the person nominated. I, on the other hand, will foreclose candidates who don’t just excoriate Trump but also excoriate those who malign the minority communities that now include drag queens, who are also just human beings even if a bit quirky in how they prance around. Is it really all that difficult?