It rarely makes sense to stand for hours alongside the hot pavement on a 110-degree Tucson day.
That held true Sunday afternoon when around 100 people gathered in the heat to protest against alleged sexual “grooming” of children.
It might have made a little sense Sunday morning, when history tells us that real grooming has taken place — and the air is cooler. But not that afternoon and especially over this non-issue.
The protesters, organized by The Bridge Christian Church, gathered outside a northwest-side Bookmans store to protest a drag story hour taking place at a secret location at that time. They carried signs that said things like “Bookmans is grooming kids with drag.”
Bookmans, the local bookstore chain, has held many drag story hours in the past, but it had to postpone this event in March, when it was initially organized, because protests instigated by The Bridge had made the event potentially unsafe, President Sean Feeney said at the time. Around the country, members of the right-wing fight club the Proud Boys and others had been interrupting similar events, intimidating participants and hosts.
After the March postponement, a group of local congregations and others had assembled to help Bookmans hold the event. The upshot was that this time, instead of holding it at a Bookmans store, they made it an RSVP-only public event at a location only disclosed to participants.
It turned out to be at St. Francis in the Foothills United Methodist Church, near North Swan Road and East River Road.
“The decision was made before I got here, but I was fully on board,” the new pastor of the church, Rev. Michael Wilkerson, told me. “This is an open and affirming congregation.”
Beyond the intricate registration process, there were security guards on site to protect participants, Wilkerson said. About 60 people showed up, maybe 40 percent of them children.
The performer — who wore a top hat, suit, makeup and a tail — read three stories all with the theme of inclusion and tolerance, Wilkerson said.
“There was no sexual allusion of any kind,” he said.
From the beginning, the protest made little sense. Bookmans had hosted these events for years without any known negative consequences.
Theoretically, at the store, a child could have wandered into a drag story hour session without their parents and seen it on their own. But then what harm would have come the child? And on Sunday, the event would not have been accessible to any child without a parent.
So why would anyone protest? Parents have a right to think differently from members of The Bridge and other conservative evangelical churches.
Kimberly McAllister, the wife of The Bridge’s lead pastor David McAllister, told radio host Garret Lewis in March that she and friends started the protest.
Bookmans’ drag story hour, she claimed, represented “grooming.”
“They just want to push their adult agenda on children,” she said.
But let’s be real: This is part of a much bigger culture-war political push. In a backlash to changing social norms about sexual identity and gender expression, some conservative Christians have invented a reason for hatred: They say sexual minorities are trying to groom our children into becoming trans or gay or to victimize them.
You know, drag isn’t for everybody. I’ve seen performances a couple of times but never go out of my way for them and probably wouldn’t have brought my children when they were younger.
But I ought to have a right to do that without threat or intimidation and going through an elaborate registration process to visit a secret site. To use the phrase this group likes to use, we can be “mama bear” and “papa bear” to our own children — we don’t need them to butt in.
There’s something else here, though, that is especially annoying: The objections of activists from churches like The Bridge feels so much like projection.
If there’s anywhere we’ve seen “grooming” behavior, it has been in churches. The Roman Catholic Church, of course, has been a notoriously protective home for abusers. In 2004, the Diocese of Tucson was the second in the country to file for bankruptcy protection as a result of judgments in sexual abuse cases.
But Protestant churches have also been a longtime home for sexual abusers and sometimes acted as their protectors. An investigation into the Southern Baptist Convention found repeated abuse and protection of abusers throughout that network of churches, the largest Protestant denomination in the country.
One of the Southern Baptist cases was that of Chris Decaire, a youth minister at East Side Baptist Church in Tucson, who was sentenced to 79 years in prison in 2009 for sexually molesting a 13-year-old girl.
Another huge denomination, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, told a Cochise County bishop not to report ongoing sexual assault of his children by a church member, Paul Douglas Adams.
But at least those mega denominations have governing boards that grudgingly started to take the problem seriously in recent decades or years. At non-denominational churches like The Bridge, the degree of governance will differ from church to church, as will the degree of welcome for grooming and abuse.
For those who care about real-life grooming, not the pretend stuff they protested Sunday, that should be good news. They can carry out their anti-grooming activities on Sunday mornings in the air-conditioned comfort of their own church.
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