Tim Steller's column: Proposed drag show ban part of broader culture war

As legislators rush to pass a budget before the June 30 deadline, it’s hard to believe the state Senate’s GOP leaders made time for this.

In a strongly worded press release last week, they proposed, of all things, banning children from attending performances by drag queens. They cited a drag show put on by students in a Tucson High School club and a “family-friendly” drag show featuring Native American performers that took place June 3 at the Heard Museum.

Southern Arizona’s own Sen. Vince Leach is spearheading the effort, although he is also vice-chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. That committee, of course, is hearing last-minute budget proposals rushed out this week.

But we shouldn’t lay the idea strictly at Leach’s feet. He and the other GOP leaders acknowledged coordinating with officials in other states to develop this proposal. In Florida and Texas, too, GOP officeholders have proposed calling child-protection authorities on parents who take children to see drag shows.

All these proposals are also linked to a bigger effort. Right-wing activists have been targeting events around the country during June, which is Pride Month.

In the most notorious case, police in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, arrested 31 members of the neo-Nazi group Patriot Front as they rode in a U-Haul to disrupt a pride event. In San Lorenzo, California, a group of 10 apparent members of the Proud Boys group interrupted an event at a local library in which a drag queen was planning on reading to children during a story hour. They yelled that the performer was a “groomer” and a “pedophile.”

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This brings up the even broader context of the proposal Leach and company are making. It is essentially QAnon Lite, suggesting a pedophile threat without saying it.

QAnon, of course, is the conspiracy theory that gripped millions of Americans during the pandemic’s first year or two. Inspired by cryptic posts made online by someone purporting to be a high federal official, believers concluded that a global conspiracy of Satanic pedophiles, largely Democrats or “globalists,” was trafficking in children — and Donald Trump was secretly rounding them up.

About 25% of Republicans, 14% of independents and 9% of Democrats believe the main QAnon story, a February report by the Public Religion Research Institute showed. And they are largely Trump enthusiasts.

So it’s no coincidence that this year labeling political opponents as “groomers” or “pedophiles” became a major talking point among Trump-supporting Republicans. Even in the hearing for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sen. Josh Hawley and others argued that as a judge she had been soft on child sexual predators, giving a nod to QAnon believers.

It happens to Republicans like Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, too. He testified Tuesday to the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that he was harassed at his home after he refused to bow to Trump’s demands that he try to decertify Arizona’s 2020 election results.

“They have had panel trucks with videos of me, proclaiming me to be a pedophile and a pervert and a corrupt politician,” Bowers said.

None of this is accidental of course. One of the architects of the Critical Race Theory panic of 2021 has also been trying to construct a pedophile/groomer panic in 2022. Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has publicly tried to frame issues so as to give them the most culture-war power.

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On June 17, for example, he tweeted, “Conservatives should start using the phrase ‘trans stripper’ in lieu of ‘drag queen.’ It has a more lurid set of connotations and shifts the debate to sexualization.”

This is the political context for the Leach proposal, which, by the way, has not even been drafted into a bill yet and seems very unlikely to become law this year. Still, some Democratic senators used Monday’s floor session to rail against the idea as dangerously associating lesbian, gay and trans people with pedophilia.

“If we want to start banning children from things based on some illegitimate cause and effect relationship, there’s a long list of things we could be banning children from aside from just drag shows,” Sen. Martin Quezada said.

He cited the massive sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts of America and the Southern Baptist Convention.

“If we care about kids, what are we doing about those things?” he said.

Leach appealed to Quezada and the other Democrats to join him in fighting the drag-show scourge.

“I’m frustrated,” Leach said. “I’m admitting there’s a problem, and we’re getting push back when we call it out. Don’t push back. Jump in the ship with me.”

But this really isn’t a big problem, even using the example that the GOP leaders cited. In their press release, they linked to an Arizona Republic story about the Heard Museum show, which includes a 17-photo gallery that shows nothing much at all.

Yes, there were children present, but it all looked pretty tame, not like the “hyper-sexualized performances” the press release decried.

Now, I wouldn’t want my children to have attended “hyper-sexualized” drag shows, but I would leave it up to the parents to decide what those are. That is, after all, in the spirit of what Republicans were demanding earlier this year — parental, not school, control in raising their kids.

Perhaps, though, the talk of drag shows is really a cover for discomfort with the unapologetic presence of sexual minorities in society. In a curious paragraph in the press release, the leaders seem to support discrimination against them.

“Policies of ‘nondiscrimination regarding gender expression and sexual orientation’ are sending a message to society that we should disregard morals and values just to normalize these unscientific, broad, ill-defined and subjective terms, which set a dangerous precedent for our children that are too young to be exposed to such concepts.”

If this were really about protecting children from their greatest threats, I don’t think drag shows is the place to start. But, as the reference to non-discrimination policies shows, that’s not what this is really about.