What a Drag: Corrupting the Innocent at Children’s Libraries

The New York Times has treated its readers to an article: “Drag Queen Story Hour Continues Its Reign at Libraries, Despite Backlash.” It must be a relief to the Times’ audience to know that this is so. The struggle to assure the ascendancy of the Drag Queen Story Hour is, of course, presented in the usual terms of intolerance on the side of those who oppose it, and toleration and acceptance on the side of those who embrace it.

Melissa Bean, who started the Middle Tennessee chapter of Drag Queen Story Hour, reassures us. “There is no hidden agenda or meaning behind it. We are not trying to breed drag kids.” Indeed, what they are most interested in is not drag recruitment but something much bigger. That is, establishing the public acceptance of the principle at the heart of the LGBTQ movement. That includes allowing men to traipse around in women’s clothing and makeup in front of children. But it goes even further than that. The hidden agenda exists, and it is a metaphysical one. It’s all about man dethroning God.

Queer Role Models for Kids
Before getting to its roots, let’s take a look at what is going on. First of all, who are drag queens? “It’s true,” confesses Mr. Von B in the Huffington Post, “that the majority of drag queens are gay.” And so confirms Merriam-Webster in its definition of a drag queen: “a usually gay man who dresses as a woman.” The website for the Drag Queen Story Hour announces a coming event at the New York Public Library.

Celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride Month with a #Stonewall50 Summer Reading Party. Join us for an evening celebrating queer NYC life with a literary twist. Drag Performances: Miz Jade kicks off the event with unstoppable lip sync.

We can see Miz Jade here. The photograph tells you everything you need to know. Do you wish to expose your child to this person and his vamping?

“Dress Up Is Real”
Somewhat at odds with Bean’s reassurance is the DQSH website’s language.

DQSH captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models. In spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real.

The website carries this endorsement from Judy Zuckerman, director of Youth and Family Services, Brooklyn Public Library.

Drag Queen Story Hour is a fun and important program that celebrates diversity in the way that children may dress and act. It encourages children to look beyond that gender stereotypes and embrace unfettered exploration of self. Programs like DQSH encourage acceptance of difference.

Edie Pasek, who organizes story hour events in and around Milwaukee, has a spiel all prepared for the children.

Normally, we say, “It’s O.K. to be the way you are, and the people outside are yelling because they don’t want us to be the way we are. And the kids do the Mr. Rogers thing. They say, ‘We like you just the way you are.”

Targeting the Innocent
Objective achieved. Mission accomplished. It is a measure of the depravity of elements of the LGBT movement that they will not spare the innocence of children. Not when the goal is rationalizing their misbehavior. They can’t leave innocence standing. It’s a natural foil to corruption. Its very existence rebukes them. So they must corrupt it. By indoctrinating kids. These activists need to obliterate the healthy distinctions by which those kids could lead a good life.

It is a measure of the depravity of elements of the LGBT movement that they will not spare the innocence of children. Not when the goal is rationalizing their misbehavior. They can’t leave innocence standing. It’s a natural foil to corruption. Its very existence rebukes them. So they must corrupt it.

The body language and dress of the drag queens teach children things. Namely, that the abnormal is normal, the immoral is moral, and vice is a virtue. The not-so-hidden goal of the library programs is clear. Make the abnormal normative before the children have developed their critical faculties of thought.

Denying Free Will

That’s the only purpose of Drag Queen Story Hour. 
Promoting moral sickness as moral well-being to children. An obvious side effect? To degrade the dignity of human free will and responsibility. That’s what you get when you teach the young that perverse behaviors are inevitable outcomes of “who we are.” Instead of freely chosen actions with both moral and physical consequences. In saner times, parents who took their children to such events would get busted for child abuse. Those who performed would be arrested for the corruption of minors.

But the damage goes even deeper. What does it take for one to imagine reality as whatever one wishes, where pretend becomes real? First, you must shove reality out of the way. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre showed how easy this can be. “Atheistic existentialism,” he declared “states that if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept and that this being is man.” Therefore, “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” He is “only what he wills himself to be.”

Sartre’s paramour, feminist pioneer Simone de Beauvoir, also made this explicit. “The basis of existentialism is precise that there is no human nature, and thus no ‘feminine nature.’” In a forecast of the transgender movement, she concluded, “The mammary glands that develop at puberty have no role in the woman’s individual economy: they can be removed at any moment in her life.” Nature, de Beauvoir insisted, “is not something given.” Therefore, the breasts can be taken away, or, for drag queens, strapped on with a little padding.

Gibberish Dressed Up as “Deep Thoughts”
Do you find these ideas confusing? That’s because they rest on a howling metaphysical contradiction. In classical metaphysics, existence and essence are like matter and form. They necessarily go together. Matter cannot exist without form; there is no formless matter. Likewise, everything that exists in the universe has to exist as something. Existence is not wandering around the universe all by itself. For instance, a cat cannot have an existence outside of its being a cat. The only being that has existence as its essence, i.e. that exists necessarily, is God. Nothing else exists necessarily, and therefore nothing in the universe can have existed prior to its essence. It simply would not be.

This self-willing, this attempted replacement of God with oneself, is the source of the LGBT obsession with personal authenticity. That’s what one must gain in order to secure one’s very existence from the underlying nothingness. The Human Rights Campaign, the LGBT advocacy group, speaks of the need for transgender persons to live “authentic lives.” But this is what they are really talking about – the need for all of us to lead “authentic lives” exactly on the same terms Sartre and de Beauvoir set forth. That is, to be “as gods” by creating our own essences. This is how we get to “embrace the unfettered exploration of self,” as espoused by Zuckerman.

“You Will Be Like Gods”
Aristotle knew better. He said that man does not make himself to be a man. Man does not get to fabricate his end or telos. Human nature is a given. Its meaning is not located in man’s will or desires, but in pre-existing reality – in what is. It is immutable intrinsic to him.

Consequently, while man can know what is good or evil, he does not get to decide that. “Oughtness” is already in the given nature of things. Therefore, man is morally obliged to choose the good that will bring about what “ought” to be. Otherwise, he will become less than fully human and what he “ought” not to be – perhaps even something worse than a beast, as Aristotle warned.

So this is all about will, and demonic will at that. Sartre and his followers use that to replace what is real and given. That “frees” us to pretend that we can become whatever we wish. That “dress up is real,” no matter the extent of the defacement involved. Metaphysical contradiction leads to self-contradiction, as in a man pretending to be a woman to overcome “gender restrictions.” What is left is still a man, but now transmogrified. Not only is it physically impossible for him, but a man “ought” not to be a woman.

Monstrous Rebellion, Real Consequences
The bad philosophy of rebellion against God. That’s what drag queens are foisting on our children in our public libraries. And it’s monstrous.

Perhaps the library program could sponsor a Bible reading before the exhibitionism. Here is a suggested text: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” Matthew 18:6.


Robert Reilly was Senior Advisor for Information Strategy (2002-2006) for the U.S. Secretary of Defense, after which he taught at National Defense University. He was the director of the Voice of America (2001-2002) and served in the White House as a Special Assistant to the President (1983-1985). He is author, most recently, of Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything (Ignatius Press, 2014).