This is a Joke Right?

You’re looking at a drag queen named, Brita Filter (!?), singing and dancing down the aisle of an Episcopal church in New York. You might even be able to spot the school-aged children in the background.

In August of 2022, this school sponsored event slipped under the radar. Maybe mainstream media downplayed drag stories for the election. Or maybe there were too many incidents to keep track of. But whatever the reason, many of us are just now hearing about this NYPost story about a mandatory. drag. queen. school-sponsored. chapel-service. in the church sanctuary. The sentence just gets worse with every word.

It’s tough to shock people these days, but this one shocked me. Drag activism is no longer just in libraries or public schools. Now it’s in private schools. private Christian schools. Even prestigious private Christian schools (i.e., $59k a year tuition). Even in their chapel services in the church sanctuary!

When I posted about this on social media earlier in the week, some progressive friends chimed in saying, “what’s the big deal?” I didn’t know if they were serious. But, pressing further, I found they really didn’t see the harm in it. I never thought I’d have to make this argument, but this is the world we live in.

Here’s What’s wrong with Drag Queen Chapel

1. Orienting Kids into Drag Culture Is Not the School’s Job

The school’s job is education, not woke social engineering experiments.

More specifically, gender and sex education are first and foremost the parent’s job, not the school’s. And it’s definitely not the job of a drag performer in a chapel service. That’s because gender and sex-education theories are loaded with contentious ideology, yet they aren’t a proper field of academic study. To be sure, schools have tried to incorporate social theories about libertine sex and queering gender, but it’s often met with opposition precisely because that’s not historically or normally the school’s job. These subjects are not modern liberal arts (reading, writing, or arithmetic), or classic liberal arts (trivium or quadrivium). It’s not English Lit. It’s not History. It’s not even PE or sports. At best, it’s part of the social-engineering wing of the public-model of education. In other words, the closest it comes to a legitimate school subject is as a subset of “health” class subtly competing against parental influence while often smuggling partisan agenda items into the curriculum through Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) or Social Emotional Learning (SEL).

While sex-education and gender theory are not clearly curricular studies, they are however extremely, private, nuanced, politically partisan, and often dogmatic. If there is any subject area where parents are better fit than schools for training up children, it is in the area of gender and sexuality. That’s because parents, and not the schools, will be held most responsible for the results. Ideas have consequences, and when one party disproportionately absorbs those consequences, they should have the greater voice in discerning between those ideas. As one scholar puts it:

“Who ‘owns’ the child [student], then? The choice is between the parents who have taken the trouble to have and raise the child – and who, in almost all cases, will give their lives to support the child for as long as it takes and longer – or the educational bureaucracy, which is more likely than a parent to look upon the child as an asset in a social engineering project to rearrange government and society”

Dr. Larry P. Arnin, “Education as a Battleground” (Nov. 3, 2022)

2. It’s Sexualized Exposure to Children

Early sexualization of children is a known risk factor for all sorts of negative outcomes for young people (higher rates of substance abuse, teen pregnancy, mental illness, suicide ideation, etc.). For more on this see: Harvard “All About Sex: Global Childhood Sexualization,” APA “Task force on the Sexualization of Young Girls”, and Oxford “Premature Sexualization.”

To intentionally expose children to sexually-infused material or behavior is risky business. Obvious cases would be sexual-play and pornography, i.e., pornification. Less-obvious cases of “sexualization” can still be risky too though. These might include sexually suggestive dancing, burlesque routines, sex-jokes, sex-scenes in movies, premature sexual education, and gender-bending dances. Even when we distinguish between pornification (which probably isn’t happening in this Drag chapel), versus a more general “sexualization,” the problem doesn’t go away. Young people still tend to aspire to, ask about, mimic, and experiment when exposed to sexually charged material.

3. It’s Wrong to Force This on Kids.

It’s bad enough that the school is hosting a “Drag chapel.” But, it’s only worse when the kids are forced to attend. As in most Christian schools, the chapel services are mandatory. Kids shouldn’t be forced to watch anything sexually suggestive or grender-transgressive in a school function.

4. Even a Sex-ed Class Shouldn’t Include Cross-Dressing Burlesque

Even in a sex-ed class, which is supposed to address sexual topics, it would be grossly irresponsible to force kids to watch burlesque dancers – cis, trans, or queer. And drag is effectively cross-dressing burlesque. Sex and gender are delicate issues, which might not even be rightful topics for schools to address. But even if they were rightful school subjects, they should be addressed carefully and respectfully, with deference to parental rights. These topics deserve discretion, not a cross-dressing burlesque show from leotarded fat man in Tammy-Faye makeup.

5. Even some Drag Performers Object

Some drag queens openly acknowledge that incorporating children into drag culture is a HORRIBLE idea for many reasons, including pedophilic connotations.

6. It Reeks of Sexual Grooming

Critics often accuse LGBTQ+ activists of “sexual grooming.” This drag queen chapel is a good example. But to be clear, “sexual grooming” doesn’t necessarily mean “pedo-grooming.” Sure, this has faint “pedo” connotations, but no one here is accusing the drag queen or any school officials of being a pedophile. Pedo-grooming is just one kind of grooming. there are other kinds. Grooming sometimes refers to when predators socially condition kids to victimize them sexually. That in other cases, sexual can refer to conditioning kids for gender bending and or sexual activity with themselves or each other. When school officials use school functions to set encourage students to explore gender-bending sexual identities, that’s sexual grooming. It’s hard to escape that implication, when they’re showcasing a drag queen in chapel. Now we don’t have to sniff out child molesters here to recognize that something still stinks. This drag chapel reeks of sexual grooming.

If not pedophilia, it’s at least a sexually charged social grooming experiment from a CHRISTIAN school which amounts to heretical transgressive ideology with no textual basis in Scripture, no historical roots in Christianity, and only a recent blip on the radar for a few denominations who sacrificed orthodoxy a long time ago.

7. It’s Sacrilegious

It’s pretty sacrilegious to sexually dance down the aisle at a chapel service, in a church building, in defiance of several biblical guidelines, and especially as a drag queen. See, Deuteronomy 22:5; Genesis 18:16-19:29; Leviticus 19:30; 20:13; 26:2; Matthew 19:5-6; Romans 1:1-32; Jude 1:6-7, et al.

8. Drag Pedagogy is Pseudo-Science

Drag Pedagogy is the educational equivalent of pseudo-science. It’s an indoctrination/socialization program that hasn’t earned any real respect in the educational world. It’s loaded with religious-level dogma. It’s scientifically unproven. It carries an obvious socio-political agenda from its founder, “Lil Miss Hot Mess.” Among other things, it’s bald-faced queer-grooming. That is, it’s grooming children into a gender-queering (anti-binary) view of male and female.

9. It’s a Double-Standard.

If it would be wrong for a woman, scantily clad/tight-clothed, to dance suggestively down the aisle of the church in front of hundreds of children, then it’s wrong for a man to do it, whether dressed as a woman or not. This point has been made before, in dramatic fashion when a concerned parent illustrated the double-standard for conduct and dress code by donning the drag-queens outfit herself.

10. Drag is Blackface for Women

There’s a strong case, even by some liberals, that drag is blackface for women. Even if that’s up for debate, it’s more respectful to just abstain rather than risk brazen insult and degradation of all women present by mocking their gender in caricature.

***

If it’s not abundantly clear already, this drag queen chapel illustrates a misguided attempt at socially engineering tomorrow’s leaders into a non-Christian view of sex, gender, and family. Now, it’s entirely possible that most students there watched this drag performance like onlookers at a car wreck. Kids likely pointed and snickered, shrugged it off, or eye-rolled and cringed at awkwardness. This drag queen’s outfit was comparatively modest, and the dance routine fairly tame (compared to other drag queens). So, he probably didn’t detonate the gender-binary single handedly. This performance would just be a weird outlier, except that it’s not. It’s not a one-off thing. The school has a “Pride Chapel” every year. As an episcopalian school, that denomination is well-known for embracing the rainbow (LGBTQ+). And, if you’ve been paying any attention to the growing LGBTQ+ activism since at least the Obergfell “gay-marriage” case in 2015 then you’re seeing the upward trend.

The most alarming thing about this drag queen chapel is not that it happened. It’s not that it happened at Christian school, or at a wealthy prestigious Christian school. The most alarming thing is that they thought it was a good idea. Ten years ago this would have been an epic senior prank, a master class in trolling. But today, the jokes on them, but it’s not funny anymore. It’s kinda scary actually. They honestly believe this drag-style abomination of desecration is a nourishing dose of woke enlightenment.

Those children need our prayers. And the school officials need to go to confessional.


* The original article: Students at Elite Christian School Forced to Attend Drag Queen Performance In Church Service – NYPost