Drag Brunch

A Brief Refresher on the Not-So-Distant Past

Republicans would become apoplectic every time Democrats wanted to use government resources to help those who have been overlooked, ignored, or openly punched in the face by society. They called us the Nanny State. Somehow convinced that everyone in America has the same access to wealth and power, they banged their chest about having the FREEDOM to build your life without all this oppressive help being crammed down your throat. And if for some reason you’re not able to get and keep what’s yours, you’ll know it’s because you’re lazy, stupid, and you lack discipline. As you’ve now proven that you can’t manage all the money that was left to you by your rich predessesors, why should we be compelled to give you more? Freedom. As if poverty was a kind of liberation.

This now fossilized version of the Republican party wanted the smallest possible government: the bare minimum needed to provide for the common defense and maybe take care of the infrastructure (we don’t want bridges falling down and disrupting cross-country shipping). Anything beyond that was considered a direct assault on their inviolate personal freedom to be better than everyone and – by virtue of their superiority – getting to decide who gets what and how much.

That’s worth saying again: they wanted the federal government to manage the military and infrastructure. Period. Because personal liberty is more important than helping a mom buy food for her kids. She didn’t ask the tax payers if she could get pregnant; why should we pay for something we didn’t order?

[Subtext: If she couldn’t afford kids, she should’ve kept her legs shut.]

Fast-Forward a Few Days

Now it’s writ large that only some people are entitled to personal liberty. The rest of us should expect to be actively ‘protected’ from things they find icky, sinful, or in some way anathema to their good Christian values. They want to reset decency to some ephemeral point in the 1950s when women and ‘negroes’ knew their place. To that end, certain topics have been jettisoned and may not be discussed or read about in school – especially if drag queens are involved – because it’s obvious that teachers are all trying to turn kids gay, persuade them to change their gender, make them feel sad and ashamed about slavery, or guilty about our slaughter, genocide, and forced relocation of millions of Native Americans. Our children need to know that America is now, and has always been, a becon of all that’s good and moral and just.

So here we stand. Again. Conservatives can’t use the REAL words for what they want, so they change the meanings of what’s in use. Greed got rebranded as ‘freedom.’ Now diversity is synonymous with ‘unqualified.’ Equity becomes ‘white racism,’ and Inclusion is NewSpeak for ‘incompetence.’ Orwell’s ‘1984’ was a cautionary tale, but we’re treating like fucking HANDBOOK.

Sadly, we’re stuck in a dystopian tar pit of our own making: it’s our certainty that we’d never go back. We’ve had an African American president! That shit could never happen again, because we’ve evolved. But the Unthinkable Things are happening: we’re burning books, revising history, criminalizing dissent or the slightest discomfort, and women are again suffering and dying for lack of reproductive healthcare because someone wants to assign personhood to a teaspoon of raspberry jam. In fine Orwellian style, we’re celebrating tyranny because all this freedom has made us weak and lazy.

Poached salmon, Belgian waffles, drag queens doing comedy and serving champaign: These are things you worry about; things from which you are protecting us. I just need to know what entitles you people to interfere with how any child but your own experiences life? I don’t subscribe to your way of thinking. So if I let you restrict or indoctrinate my kids according to your moral code, isn’t that just a different kind of grooming? You have no jurisdiction here. You don’t run my life. You don’t pay my bills. In fact, if you’re in the government, I PAY YOURS! And THIS culture war bullshit is not the job I sent you to do.

Do Something Useful

It would be one thing if the hate- and fear-mongering politicians had fixed global warming, solved the opioid epidemic, balanced the budget, paid down the debt, made college tuition affordable, made our cities safer by providing adequate housing and mental health services for the homeless, made it easier for average Americans to buy a house, instituted a nationwide policy of immediate termination with automatic manslaughter charges filed against any police officer who kills any human for any reason, embraced the ‘WELL-REGULATED’ part the 2nd Amendment and put sensible gun laws in place, made the minimum wage into a real wage by tying it to the cost of living. I’d also expect that they finally signed the Equal Rights Amendment into law nationwide, restored a woman’s autonomy over her own body AND redirected all that Right to Life energy into removing the stigma around adoption and creating services that made it easier for a woman to carry a child to term for parents who truly want a baby. If they enshrined access to affordable childcare and healthcare in the constitution as basic human rights, outlawed gerrymandering and killed the electoral college realizing that it makes some peoples’ votes count more than others based solely on where they live, pulled all corporate money out of politics, linked CEO bonuses to how many good jobs they’re creating vs how much money they made for the shareholders, closed tax loopholes that allowed those CEOs and shareholders to pay zero taxes, and cured cancer, that would be something.

Because then I’d say, ‘well, hell. They’ve solved every other problem we had, so maybe I should consider their viewpoint.’

Until all that happens, none of you clowns are going to tell us how to spend a Sunday afternoon with our kids. At minimum, I’m going to socialize my kid as much as a good dog owner will introduce their puppy to the world. I’ll be there to answer questions they have; I’ll tell them how I feel about things and why, but that they should try to understand the situation and make up their own mind when they’re ready. Because that’s the promise we make when we create new humans: they need to understand both kindness and conviction, strength and acceptance, and to remember that personal integrity is —by its nature— PERSONAL. You can not force others to live by your values. All you can do is set a good example that others may choose to emulate.

Instead of trying to manage everyone else’s life, maybe these so-called Christians should try to be more Christ-like. Be generous, compassionate, and forgiving. Help those in need, feed the hungry, and stop worrying about the ‘sins’ of others when you yourselves are so very far from perfect.

If you don’t want your kids going to a ‘Drag Brunch,’ well, that’s your prerogative. But the whole ‘grooming’ thing is a red herring, not to mention disrespectful. You invented a morality crisis because you know you can’t say, “things about sex make me uncomfortable and I just don’t like people who aren’t like me.” I, on the other hand, believe in the actual freedom and liberty that’s promised in our constitution. It means I protect and defend the rights of ALL, not that I get to decide who’s worthy of it.

I’ll even defend your right to have shit opinions. But it doesn’t mean that I’ll dive into the shit with you.