I’ll start with my thesis, which I don’t usually like to do. Banning drag shows, or criminalizing people in drag (or trans people) interacting with children, isn’t a policy advocated by people for whom preventing the raping or sexualizing children is the highest priority, or even an even very high priority at all. Were they actually concerned about sexualizing and raping children, then they would be up in arms about what is happening in Christian churches. They aren’t because they aren’t.
They don’t actually care very much about raping or sexualizing children, as long as it’s done by in-group members. The best proof of that fact is that no one outraged about drag performers will read any more of this post, nor will they look at the data on sexual abuse in churches. If they really cared about sexual abuse, they’d want to know what causes it.
They don’t because they don’t.
I spend a lot of time drifting around various spaces on social media, and I try to get people to explain their position on various issues.. (Since so many people use social media simply to show they hate the out-group, that’s not easy.) I’ve never managed to get anyone to explain why they worry more about drag queens than about the people most likely to rape children. Most child abusers are religious, as even the very conservative Missouri Synod admits. Were people outraged about drag queens actually concerned about sexual exploitation of children, and I think we all should be, then they would have been demanding changes in major churches, like the SBC , evangelical churches , or the Catholic Church, which still isn’t managing the accusations responsibly . The SBC, like the Catholic Church , hid its sexual abuse problem for years , and “conservatives” helped them do so .
So, why, instead of trying to enact reasonable policies that deal with what is actually the problem, are people passing laws about drag queens?
They never explain that.
I’ll emphasize that point, since every person with whom I’ve engaged on this issue, or the rhetors I’ve read, never explain why we should care more about a group that has no record of sexually abusing children than the group with the highest incidence of actually doing so.
I know why, but I’d like them to admit it. They care more about preserving the reputation of their in-group than they care about in-group members raping children.
That’s really it in a nutshell, but I think there are other ways of thinking that help them rationalize that privileging of in-group loyalty over raped children.
It seems to me that there are several factors 1) binary thinking about sin; 2) rigidity about categories and order, so assuming that easing up on any of the categories of any kind will lead to chaos; 3) privileging in-group loyalty over anything, including principles, logical arguments, what Jesus said; 4) believing that “cross-dressing” is a sexual kink, and so drag queens are sexually stimulated when reading to children 5) s strategic deflection; 6) desperate deflection.
1) Binary thinking. As even G.K. Chesterton said, people have a tendency to flatten sin, and so assume that engaging in one sin necessarily leads to them all. So, if you do one of the sins, you do them all. That fallacy means that people assume that a person who is trans or dresses in drag is violating a gender norm, and therefore must be violating all the sexual norms. On the contrary, child molesters are likely to be Christian, active in the church, and very nice.
2) Fundagelicals are binary thinkers, and so they believe that a person is either saved (in-group) or a sinner (not in-group). The way that they decide that someone is in-group is that they are loyal to the in-group—they say the right things, are nice to the right people, claim to have the same values. A person gets “moral license” by being a member of the group, and therefore any of their transgressions are forgiven, regardless of how often they transgress, or the consequences of their transgression. And, for them, “forgiveness” means “pretending it never happened” and therefore never mentioning it again.
In other words, at least in my experience of how “conservative” Christians explain how their moral standards work, it’s all about in- v. out-group, and not able holding everyone to the same standards.
3) It’s interesting to me the way that “conservative” “Christians” flatten transgressions, ignoring the question of harm. This flattening became clear to me when Daniel Lavery (a trans man) exposed that, not only was his brother sexually attracted to minors, but he was being protected by the leader of the church, and put in positions of working with children. The leader of the church was Lavery’s father. He had long known that Lavery’s brother was sexually attracted to children, and yet had kept him in a place where he was regularly interacting with children, and had not divulged that information to anyone in the church. When Lavery confronted his father, his father said something along the lines of, “Who are you to judge? You’re violating sexual norms too.”
Lavery, an adult engaged in consensual relationships with other adults, was treated as just as bad as someone who wanted to molest children.
While both being trans and wanting to molest children are transgressions, as far as Ortberg was concerned, they are not the same in terms of harm. If John Ortberg actually and genuinely cared about child rape, he would deal with the massive beam in his own eye. Were “conservative Christians” genuinely concerned about child molestation, they would clean their own house before they went after drag queens reading in a library. They don’t because they don’t.
4) Fundagelicals care more about drag queens than in-group child rapists because they can dismiss the in-group child rapists as exceptions. Upstanding church member child rapists are exceptions to the rule—there are far more upstanding church members who aren’t child rapists. Which is true. But why not use that same math for drag queens?
This is the point that makes it clear that their obsession with drag queens is irrational. It’s just deflection.
So why are drag queens more threatening than the actual child rapist in your church? Because they call into question rigid notions about gender.
5) It seems to me—and this is just based on my sometimes drifting into that world—that they believe that drag queens point out that our notions of gender are open to discussion. (Anyone even a little bit aware of the history of gender knows that, but these people refuse to admit that their categories of gender don’t match biology, let alone the variety of cultural norms. I’ve had this argument with them.) As far as I can tell, they have the sense that if we ease up on the categories in this binary about gender, then we’ll have no categories at all, and all hell will break loose.
It seems to me very similar to pro-segregation rhetoric.
It’s just fear of change, an inability to deal with nuance, and a refusal to think about the world in terms of anything other than rigid categories.
Child rapists don’t call into question gender norms, and, and I’m not kidding, many people therefore seem to find it easier to normalize child rape than they do drag queens.
6) Their only experience of something like drag queens is sexual (cross-dressing as a sexual kink), and so they assume that drag queens are turned on by being in front of children.
This is one of those arguments that seems to me shows more about the person making the argument than I really wanted to know.
It’s like someone saying we shouldn’t have shoe stores because some people get turned on by handling women’s feet. Anyone who makes that argument is someone very attached to the notion that handling feet is sexually stimulating. They think a lot about feet.
Every once in a while, someone will point out that a gay couple was accused of molesting a child, or that someone in drag did something bad. I’m sure that gay people and drag queens sometimes do something inappropriate, but the numbers of them who rape children is miniscule compared to the number of self-identified Christians who rape and sexualize children.
Jesus once said stop worrying about the tiny thing someone else is doing, and worry more about the big thing you’re doing.
And, really, that’s what all this comes down to. This isn’t about drag queens; this is about deflecting and projecting the epidemic of sexual abuse in Christian churches.
People who follow Jesus should worry more about the sexual exploitation of children that we Christians are doing, since it is so much more than what drag queens are doing. Unless we don’t really care about children, and don’t really care about what Jesus said.
And, yeah, that’s my experience of “conservative” Christians–they don’t really care about children, and they care even less about what Jesus said.
