For a couple of years now, Republicans have been ramping up their increasingly unhinged attacks on LGBTQ people, usually with the same cover story: They don't hate queer people! It's just about protecting the children! This excuse has always been paper-thin, of course, and based on the risible premise that queer people, merely by existing, are "sexual" in some undefinable way that straight people are not. It's how, for instance, Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis can pass laws that presume that depicting a same-sex wedding in a book is "pornographic," but an opposite-sex wedding is just fine for kids.
The "for the children" excuse is so flimsy, in fact, that even a Donald Trump-appointed judge in Tennessee was forced to dismiss it, late Friday night. Republican Gov. Bill Lee had signed a law banning drag wherever minors could see it, on the specious grounds that drag performances are "sexualized entertainment." The law put "male or female impersonators" in the same bucket as "topless dancers," falsely implying, for instance, that a dance performance at a Pride parade or a drag queen story hour is the same thing as a lap dance at an adults-only strip club.
