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Texas Senate Panel Approves Drag Bills
as White Supremacists Turn Up the Heat

Capitol Inside
March 28, 2023

A Texas Senate committee voted on Monday to advance a pair of bills that would turn drag queens into criminal defendants while punishing cities that allow men to read stories to kids at public libraries while decked in female apparel.

Ignoring a rash of revelations on elected Republican males who've dressed like women in the past, the State Affairs Committee endorsed the two measures that GOP State Senator Bryan Hughes of Mineola is sponsoring on 6-2 votes that played out along party lines.

Senate Bill 12 would outlaw drag performances with minors in the audience if they're designed to titillate the libido. The proposal that the powerful East Texas solon is pushing in Senate Bill 1601 would sever state funding for municipal libraries that hosts an event where "a man presenting as a woman or a woman presenting as a man reads a book or a story to a minor for entertainment and the person being dressed as the opposite gender is a primary component."

SB 12 is an unoriginal measure that's taken from a national template that the GOP is seeking to impose in red states around the country. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has designated the drag show prohibition and criminalization plan as a paramount priority for the regular session in 2023. SB 1601 may be tantamount to a cherry on an ice cream sundae as a way to take another a shot at major Texas cities that are run by Democrats as part of an unprecedented attack on local control as a concept that the Republicans here used to hold dear.

Democrats see SB 12 as one of the most concerted assaults on individual freedom, personal privacy and the expression of free speech under the First Amendment in the history of Texas and the U.S. But Hughes and other Republicans insist that they're simply trying to protect children from sexual exploitation with the crackdown on drag shows that the legislation would classify as sexually oriented. They're relying on the same basic argument with censorship and book banning bills that could make all-time Texas classics like Lonesone Dove become forbidden material in Texas public schools.

SB 12 would define a sexually oriented performance as one with "a performer who is nude" with "a male performer exhibiting as a female, or a female performer exhibiting as a male, who uses clothing, makeup, or other similar physical markers and who sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs before an audience." It would apply to a show that "appeals to the prurient interest in sex."

Prurient is defined as "having, inclined to have, or characterized by lascivious or lustful thoughts, desires" on Dictionary.com. The Senate drag bill supporters are making themselves experts on the subject with the attempt to regulate it in accordance with their own religious views.

Senate Republicans have shown no concern up to now on the possibility that the legislation could pour fuel into an already volatile atmosphere at a time when neo-Nazis and other white supremacists have been protesting drag shows amid an alarming escalation in threats of violence against performers and promoters alike.

Texas and Ohio have been hotbeds for angry confrontations between drag show supporters and right-wing extremists in recent months.

more to come ...

 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

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