BC’s Culture Guard terms Drag Queen events ‘child endangerment’
January 17, 2020 (RoadKillRadio News) — Public libraries that display “age-inappropriate material”, including salacious LGBTQ2S+ books or ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ for tots, could lose state funding, and see librarians who break the law fined or even jailed, under legislation proposed by Missouri State Rep. Ben Baker.
Baker’s Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act was drafted in reaction to ‘Drag Queen Story Hours’ being held across the state.
“In some places—St. Louis, Kansas City and I think St. Jo (Joseph)—they’ve had these drag queen story hours, and that’s something that I take objection to; and I think a lot of parents do,” Baker said. “That’s where, in a public space, our kids could be exposed to something that’s age-inappropriate. That’s what I’m trying to tackle.”
The bill requires each library district to create a five-adult “oversight board” to hold public hearings and decide whether material is age-appropriate. Material deemed inappropriate would be placed in a restricted area, not accessible by minors.
Librarians who broke the law could be fined up to $500, and/or be sentenced to up to a year in jail.
Baker insists the bill is about programming, not books.
“If we were trying to ban books or censor literature, I would kill the bill, myself,” Baker said.
“But some of those [Drag Queen] events are open from ages one to teen years,” Baker said. “I don’t think a 2-, 3-, 4-year-old is prepared to grapple with those ideas; and I don’t think they should be subjected to that just by walking through the library.”
Baker called the story hours a public safety issue, saying they have “drawn child predators, pedophiles” in the past.
“Libraries should be inclusive and safe spaces for all children,” says BC’s Culture Guard executive director Kari Simson, who said she’d like to see similar protective legislation in BC. She criticized “parents stupid enough to expose their children to a deviant agenda that’s designed to entrap them into a ‘progressive’ and dangerous sexualized agenda.”
“That’s child endangerment,” Mrs. Simpson stated.
She continued: “Informed and engaged parents should seek to have the courts jail any librarian responsible for inviting this form of abuse into a public facility. This legislation needs to be adopted all across North America.”
“I think there are communities where doing a drag queen story time is throwing something in people’s faces, a deliberate provocation,” Crosby Kemper III, Kansas City Public Library’s outgoing executive director, said.
But Cynthia Dudenhoffer, the Missouri Library Association president, said her association is against the bill, decrying it as “censorship.”
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Source: Kansas City Star
