If you care about abortion rights, Nazis flouting the swastika in public supporting one party telling you what that party really is about, If you care about religious zealots pushing their church doctrines on others,
WTF is happening in the US? This idea of the US being founded as a Christian Nation is a complete fiction, yet there are so many republican governors and legislators pushing it. When did the bible become more important than the constitution? I remember that shit being push on James when he was a teen and he is now 3o years old. We have a serious problem that generations since the 1980s have grown up being taught this fiction as fact. This was done through homeschooling and church schools. This fiction was / is promoted by churches to increase their political power and the income from adding more asses in pews. I have to tell you this drive to turn the US into a theocracy is terrifying to me and should be to others. We have seen it happen in other countries where a fundamentalist religion get governmental power, and they use it to wipe out personal freedoms in order to establish a religious doctrine enforced by the power of the state. Look at Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Afghanistan. Those restrictive laws entrench the political power and funds of the religious leaders but restrict any kind of growth or advancement for the public. I can not imagine how devastating it would be for the US people to be forced to live according to the dictates of people who think morals and science was at its peak 2,500 years ago. Hugs
“Oklahomans, we have a clear choice in front of us. When it comes to our schools, do we want the radical ideology in our classroom that pushes gender theory? That pushes graphic pornography in order to push a social experiment on our kids?
“Or do want the US Constitution? Do we want documents like the Federalist Papers and the bible? So that our kids understand our history and how our government was put together?
“Those core fundamental principles have made us the greatest country in the history of the world. Real Americans know that we’ve got to support our kids by giving them a great understanding of our history.
“Radical leftists and Biden administration, they would prefer to sexualize our kids.” – Oklahoma superintendent of public schools Ryan Walters.
Walters, who was appointed state secretary of education by Christianist Gov. Kevin Stitt in 2020, faced calls to resign in 2022 after it was revealed that a Koch-funded group that advocates for privatizing public schools was paying him $120,000/year.
Stitt rejected calls for Walters’ resignation and attempted to reappoint him again earlier this year, but the state Senate refused to allow him to hold the elected superintendent and appointed secretary of education posts at the same time.
Walters last appeared on JMG in October 2022 when he called for reeducating all teachers with “Christian patriotic history” in a program operated by Michigan’s far-right Hillsdale College.
OK Superintendent of Schools says the Biden Admin is pushing graphic pornography and gender theory in schools to sexualize our kids, but he says students should be taught from important historical documents like the Bible. pic.twitter.com/fxum2wn3xx
Oklahomans, we have a clear choice in front of us. When it comes to our schools, do we want the radical ideology in our classroom that pushes gender theory? That pushes graphic pornography in order to push a social experiment on our kids?
Are people so stupid that they think teachers are hauling out their Honcho magazines into the classroom? That’s what Sunday school is for.
That’s what gets me. People eat this crap up with absolutely no proof of any of it. And hey, what happened to the kitty litter in the classrooms issue?
This is interesting. It lays the plan of the Christian Nationalists out clearly with their goal of RULING the rest of us. Hugs
Ahn told the faithful that Trump’s victory would be their victory: “We’re going to rule and reign through President Trump and under the lordship of Jesus Christ.” Ahn has long been explicit in his quest to have Christians conquer the mountains of influence — to become the “head not the tail” in directing government and culture. “Once we do get to the head, then all of a sudden we can make decrees and declarations,” he explained in a 2010 interview. “When you get to the top,” he said, “you can start doing some radical things for the Lord.”
Why Are So Many Democrats Backing an Accused Christian Nationalist?
Derrick Peterson claims he’s running “to represent diversity in its purest form,” but his Christian nationalist affiliations suggest otherwise
“I’M NOT A Christian nationalist,” Derrick Peterson, a leading school board candidate in Portland, Oregon, tells Rolling Stone.
It’s an unusual declaration. But Peterson is an unusual politician.
In the biography he touts, Peterson is a career law enforcement officer — a Black man who spent 35 years rising through the ranks of the local sheriff’s department, before making an unsuccessful election bid for sheriff in 2022.
But Peterson has other credentials that he does not trumpet. He’s a commissioned “apostle” in the church of a Christian-nationalist preacher who rejects the separation of church and state as a myth “from the pit of hell,” and who traveled to Washington, D.C., to back president Trump on Jan. 6, 2021.
In 2020, Peterson was also named to the board of that church’s anti-abortion activist organization, 1Race4Life, whose members pledge to always “vote pro-life” and to “defend the sacred covenant of marriage between a man and a woman.” (Peterson now disputes this affiliation.)
This second set of bona fides present Peterson as an uneasy fit in uber-progressive Portland, where abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights are politically sacrosanct. But on the strength of his public credentials, Peterson has been endorsed by a wide swath of the city’s center-left establishment, including by The Oregonian, the Willamette Week alt weekly, as well as by a gay city commissioner, the progressive county DA, prominent local Black politicians, and the Willamette Women Democrats.
Is Peterson a stealth candidate — poised to secure a victory for the religious right in the beating heart of blue-state liberalism?He disputes this notion, telling Rolling Stone: “I have no hidden agendas.” But a leading scholar of the charismatic Christian movement that holds up Peterson as one of its own, calls the candidate’s explanations “hard to square.”
Nationally, school boards have emerged as a front line in America’s culture wars — with high stakes for the hearts and minds of young Americans. Right wingers are pushing into school governance in an effort to stymie evolving social norms on gender and sexuality as well as to block a factual accounting of America’s dark history of enslavement and genocide. School boards can set local standards on everything from banning books; to forcing trans students to use the wrong pronouns or the wrong bathrooms; to muzzling teachers from discussing their own racial and gender identities with students.
This cultural fight goes hand-in-glove with a rising tide of Christian nationalism that seeks to remake America according to fundamentalist biblical standards, in hopes of hastening the second coming of Christ. Christian nationalists have raised alarm at the “grooming” of a younger generation in public schools — a move away from God’s truth orchestrated by what they perceive as “demonic” forces.
For his part, Peterson — a registered Democrat — claims he’s been the victim of a misunderstanding. He hotly contests that he was, in fact, on the board of the anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion 1Race4Life — and that his name and likeness were misappropriated. “I am not affiliated with this group, nor does it reflect my views on marriage equality and reproductive health,” he said in written answers to Rolling Stone’s questions. “My view is that everyone has the right to make their individual personal choice about what they do with their own body. I have also been an active advocate for LGBTQ+ rights.”
Despite appearing on 1Race4Life’s website since 2020, Peterson claims he only became aware of his disputed board membership last week and “took action to have my picture, name, and information removed immediately.” 1Race4Life did not return Rolling Stone’s inquiries about Peterson. (The entire website is currently down at press time, though its social channels are still active.)
1Race4Life is a project of the ministry of Ché Ahn, a leading Christian nationalist, affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation. NAR preachers come out of the Charismatic or Pentecostal tradition that believes in “gifts of the spirit” — including speaking in tongues and the performance of miracles. NAR ministries also hold that prophecy is not a bygone biblical artifact, rather that we live in a new age of “prophets” and “apostles” who receive direct messages from God and help exert His authority here on Earth. Many adherents believe that it is the job of Christians to seize control of government and culture to bring the world into biblical alignment so that Christ can return and reign over the Earth.
1Race4Life was Ahn’s response to the uprisings after the George Floyd murder — seeking to channel the emotions around the value of life into protecting the unborn. 1Race4Life describes itself as “an apostolic network of ethnically and culturally diverse, pro-life Evangelical leaders committed to seeing the end of abortion on a local, state, and national level.”
Along with Peterson, the 1Race4Life board included top Christian nationalist figures including Lance Wallnau. Wallnau is a chief promoter of the Seven Mountains Mandate, which calls on Christians to attempt a national takeover by capturing the seven pinnacles of culture — including religion, entertainment, government, and education.
“It’s implausible to me that Derrick Peterson had no idea that he was getting placed on this board with all these brand-name people in that independent charismatic world,” says Matthew Taylor, Protestant Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies who is writing a book on the role of religion in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Ahn has long been explicit in his quest to have Christians conquer the mountains of influence — to become the “head not the tail” in directing government and culture. “Once we do get to the head, then all of a sudden we can make decrees and declarations,” he explained in a 2010 interview. “When you get to the top,” he said, “you can start doing some radical things for the Lord.”
Ahn was a based Trump supporter who insisted that the 2020 election was stolen through “egregious fraud.” He spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 5, 2021, insisting that Trump was going to stay in the White House and that America would be a “red nation in perpetuity.” Ahn told the faithful that Trump’s victory would be their victory: “We’re going to rule and reign through President Trump and under the lordship of Jesus Christ.”
“We are here to change history,” dominionist “apostle” Ché Ahn told “Stop the Steal” rally a day before the insurrection. He predicted that "we’re gonna rule and reign through President Trump and under the lordship of Jesus Christ.” pic.twitter.com/KlqDUqFlYc
Peterson now says, “I do not support the political agenda of Ché Ahn.” He insists: “I do not follow his appearances or have contact with him. This is the first time I heard about his appearance in D.C. I do not condone the acts that happened that day. I support democracy.”
Peterson did confirm to Rolling Stone, however, that he was commissioned in 2020 as an “apostle” in Ahn’s Harvest International Ministry (HIM). Today, Peterson downplays the position as if it were a service award: “I was honored for my community work as an apostle, an honorary title.” He adds: “I was being recognized for the authority I carried based on my position at work, the community, and as a long time DEI instructor. This included my ability to network, galvanize, and bring people together.”
Taylor, the expert in NAR theology, finds this explanation far-fetched. “I can’t speak for Peterson’s perception of it, but HIM does not [commission apostles] ad hoc or willy-nilly. They want to invest in these people as leaders in their network.” Peterson was named a “marketplace apostle” which in the NAR context, Taylor says, is someone who “advances the Kingdom of God outside of church.” It is a designation, Taylor adds, that “puts you in the upper tier of religious leaders.”
Peterson claims his intersection with Ahn was fleeting: “I attended one meeting and have not been involved with that church since.” Yet Peterson has since traded on his “apostle” credential, preaching at churches in the Pacific Northwest directly linked to Ahn, including the New Harvest Church outside of Tacoma, Washington.
That church’s “Statement of Faith” refers to Christians being “empowered to influence” the seven “cultural mountains”; touts “our mission to subdue the enemy and bring the Kingdom of God to the Earth”; and compares gay marriage to incest and pedophilia.
During a guest sermon in September 2020, Peterson gently corrected the church pastor who said Peterson was “not an official ordained minister” by touting that he’d been “officially commissioned as a marketplace apostle.”
Peterson’s sermon that day called on Christians to assert their power: ”It’s time to rise up and take your place — take your authority — walk in the majesty of Jesus Christ, of God, what He has given you.” He called on Christians to “get out of your seat” and begin “knocking” on the doors of power.
The service — held at the height of the George Floyd protests in Portland — closed with the church’s official pastor taking the stage with Peterson and leading a prayer to call on God to “cancel” what the pastor called “the demonic power inspiring those riots.”
Peterson’s name has also been scrubbed from the web page for Ché Ahn’s church that announced his commissioning as an apostle. “Who is he calling to get those pages pulled down, if he really doesn’t know what is going on?” asks Taylor. “The whole thing just doesn’t track.”
Following the money, Peterson’s political ambitions have been funded with donations from a pair of preachers, including a fellow apostle in Ahn’s network, and a Wichita, Kansas, minister who is the lead translator of a controversial version of the New Testament that Ahn touts as “the Bible of choice for the next Jesus people movement.”
For his part, Peterson tells Rolling Stone that his only objective in running is “to represent diversity in its purest form,” adding that “as a school board member, I will be committed to further helping my community, schools, and youth.”
Peterson does have competition in the vote-by-mail race, which wraps up May 16. He faces longtime school teacher Patte Sullivan, who — ironically — threw her hat into the ring before Peterson declared for the race, aiming to prevent Portland from becoming part of the national trend.
“I signed up sort of the last minute,” she said in an endorsement interview with Willamette Week last week, before Peterson’s unusual affiliations became public. “I heard on the radio that there were school board positions opening, and the back of my mind I said, ‘Oh school board — that’s where the right wing sneaks in.’ ”
A gay teen who was driven to attempt suicide after his mother came under the sway of the group Moms for Liberty is telling his story publicly.
A Vice exposé details how Moms for Liberty went from a local campaign to harass one Florida school board member to a national organization driving the politicization of education in the U.S. in just a few years. The piece also includes the heartbreaking story of one of those LGBTQ+ students, Tony, and his mother, Carolyn, whose last names are withheld to protect their privacy.
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Ron DeSantis helped Moms for Liberty members get on school boards to settle political scores
Political observers worry that the newly installed members will work to oppose LGBTQ-inclusive and anti-racist education across the state.
As writer David Gilbert reports, after being outed by his boyfriend’s parents in early 2022, Tony was berated by his Southern Baptist mother, who told him he was going to hell and forced him into counseling with their pastor, who told him that being gay was evil.
After Tony’s mental health began a precipitous decline—he reportedly stopped playing baseball, locked himself in his bedroom, and engaged in self-harm—Carolyn briefly consented to allowing him to undergo counseling with the local chapter of LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Rainbow Youth Project.
At the same time, however, Carolyn contacted Moms for Liberty after learning about the anti-LGBTQ+ group on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. For months, the group reportedly bombarded Carolyn with anti-LGBTQ+ misinformation, convincing her that Rainbow Youth Project would “convince Tony to have his private parts removed and changed.”
When Carolyn pulled her son out of counseling with the group, Tony told her, “Mom, you just killed me.” He attempted suicide that same day.
Carolyn continued to engage with Moms for Liberty, receiving a visit from a member of the group’s Austin, Texas chapter who suggested that she sue Rainbow Youth Project for “damaging” her son. Tony’s mental health continued to decline, and a second suicide attempt followed.
“They were trying to indoctrinate me to be a foot soldier for their cause,” Carolyn now says of Moms for Liberty. “Looking back, it was never about Tony. It was about them.”
Crushingly, Tony says that his experience is not unique. He says he knows of at least four other young people who participated in a Rainbow Youth Project virtual peer group “that have been through exactly what I have been, where Moms for Liberty and Fox News have totally pulled their parents into this same trap my mom went through.”
Carolyn now holds Moms for Liberty partially responsible for what the now 19-year-old Tony went through after she found him unconscious on his bedroom floor, overdosing. “I’m responsible because I was literally putting him second to all of this, for lack of a better term, bulls**t, that they were giving to me, and I will never do that again. Ever,” she says.
“They are preying on people and when you have a question and you’re trying to save your kid, they took advantage of me and I honestly believe they do that with other parents.”
Tony said that he and his mother are working on their relationship.
“A lot of people hold her responsible for what happened and she is partially responsible. We’ve had that discussion and she knows how I feel about that,” he said. “But she’s really trying. Our relationship is getting stronger. We’re not there yet, but it’s getting stronger.”
As one California school board member told Vice, the group is “inciting people with conspiracy theories and inflammatory accusations about grooming that put trustees, teachers, and LGBTQ students in real danger.”
Editor’s note: This article mentions suicide. If you need to talk to someone now, call the Trans Lifeline at 1-877-565-8860. It’s staffed by trans people, for trans people. The Trevor Project provides a safe, judgment-free place to talk for LGBTQ youth at 1-866-488-7386. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
FILE: Young people holding LGBTQ rainbow flag (Getty Images)
A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows over one out of every four high school students in the United States identifies as LGBTQ.
Using data it collected in 2021, the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) found that 74.2% of American high school students identified as heterosexual. The CDC surveyed 17,508 students from 152 schools across the U.S.
According to results, 3.2% of students identified as either gay or lesbian, 5.2% identified as “questioning” and 12.2% identified as bisexual. About 3.9% of students answered the question by saying they were “other” and 1.8% claimed they didn’t understand the question.
The CDC says the number of students in the United States who identify as LGBTQ has increased from 11% in 2015 to 26% in 2021. That increase “might be a result of changes in question wording to include students identifying as questioning,” the report claims.
About 57% of those high school students in the CDC’s data said that they have not had any sexual contact in their lives, while 34.6% of those students said they had sexual contact with someone of the opposite sex.
Just 2.4% of students reported that they’ve had sexual contact with the same sex, and 6% said that they’ve had sexual contact with both sexes, according to the CDC.
Polling shows that younger people are increasingly identifying as LGBTQ. Research from the analytics firm Gallup says the number of Americans who identify as LGBTQ has doubled in the last decade.
Critics, including some from the LGBTQ community, say that an “agenda” pushed in U.S. schools had led to the increase.
Everyone’s like ‘No, no, no, no that’s not indoctrination. We’re just teaching inclusion, so it doesn’t count.’ I totally disagree with that,” former U.S. Marine and bisexual member of Gays Against Groomers, Samantha Viscount, told KMPH News in Fresno, California. “I think that if you teach children all this LGBT material way too early on of an age before they understand it, it’s absolutely indoctrination.”
The concern is that our children in the schools are being taught in regards to the transgenderism, the LGBTQ agenda,” Pastor Jesse Alvarez of Valley Life Community Church in Selma, told KMPH. “And that’s one side of the story that’s an opinion, a culture, a belief in our country.”
However, LGBTQ advocates call such concerns “ignorant.”
No, I don’t think that should be a concern at all or an issue to bring up because it sounds ignorant,” Equality California’s Jorge Reyes Salinas said. “We all read books about animals. We all read books about things that may be fantasy or whatever and we’re not saying that we’re going to be that character in a book or anything like that.”
Gallup polling shows that LGBTQ identification among adults in the U.S. “leveled off” in 2022 after reaching 7.1% in 2021.
The authoritative right wing governor who is against woke and pushed through the don’t say gay bills in schools including up to 12th grade (yes no child has internet and heard about gay people by the time they are legal able to vote) has appointed a board to judge each teacher / professor by their ideology. If they are not republican enough, then they get fired or denied tenure. Remember the point of tenure was to ensure that political influence was removed from higher education teaching. That has not worked well for Republicans that are now a dying minority desperate to hold on to power. This is scary as everything DeathSantis has managed to do in Florida has been copied in other red states. Hugs
During a contentious Board of Trustees meeting Wednesday, five professors at the New College of Florida were denied tenure—even though they had already received approvals at every other point in the process.
Those professors are the latest casualties of the culture-war politics that led conservative trustees appointed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis to spearhead a self-declared “hostile takeover” of the college.
The tenure denial prompted the abrupt resignation of Matthew Lepinski, the faculty trustee on the board, who accused fellow members of destabilizing NCF. Lepinski walked out after the vote, announcing suddenly that he was “quitting the college.”
The school’s interim president, DeSantis ally and former state House Speaker Richard Corcoran, said in a memo to the trustees that he wanted the professors’ tenure denied or delayed in part because of the administrative changes and because of “a renewed focus on ensuring the college is moving towards a more traditional liberal arts institution.”
The trustees denied tenure for all five professors on identical 6-4 votes, with the new conservative board members in the majority. Shouts of “shame on you!” came from the audience afterward.
The five professors denied tenure are Rebecca Black and Lin Jiang, who both teach organic chemistry; Nassima Neggaz, history and religion with a focus on Islam; coastal and marine science professor Gerardo Toro-Farmer; and Hugo Viera-Vargas, whose specialty is Caribbean/Latin American studies and music.
— The Chronicle of Higher Education (@chronicle) April 28, 2023
In my 13 years in the Florida State University System I have NEVER seen a Board of Trustees overturn a tenure decision. The justification here were vague "extraordinary circumstances," with one board member citing "questionable publication histories." A 🧵on why that's bunk:
All 5 New College professors going up for tenure were denied today, despite approval from the college's faculty and previous administration. Every academic should be paying attention to what's happening there, now. Florida is very likely your future. https://t.co/9ZyvU7meyP
Tenure isn't just a rubber stamp. It's a years long process involving all levels of university governance, and it's incredibly thorough. These are the steps those candidates would have gone through before the Board decided to overturn it on a whim:
When you're hired to a tenure-track position, you receive both annual performance evaluations and annual tenure appraisals from your department chair. These monitor your progress towards tenure, and provide guidance for hitting the relevant marks.
At the midpoint between hiring and tenure, you undergo mid-tenure review. This involves compiling an exhaustive dossier of your accomplishments, which is appraised by a committee of your colleagues, your chair, and the dean.
All candidates must go up for tenure by their 6th year in a tenure-track position. If you go up early, as all of these New College professors did, it's because your case is a slam-dunk. You also tend to get extra scrutiny from your colleagues for going up early.
The tenure dossier is literally hundreds of pages, and it's a colossal amount of work to assemble. I've been through this process twice, once for tenure, and again for promotion to full professor. It's not fun.
Once your dossier is complied, it goes through multiple levels of review pursuant to established departmental, university, and CBA criteria. Most cases are approved (self-selection), but even then it's not 100%. Rejections happen, and it sucks for everyone involved.
By self-selection, I mean that weaker candidates tend to be weeded out earlier. Their appraisals and mid-tenure reviews make it clear that they are not progressing adequately, and they look for other positions rather than face rejection. Denial of tenure is a really bad look.
Tenure cases are reviewed by external referees, a committee of departmental faculty, the department chair, the dean, the university promotion & tenure committee, the provost, and the university president before ever getting to the Board of Trustees.
The university promotion and tenure committee is where most rejections happen. It consists of faculty from all over the university, and they take their job very seriously. The time commitment is immense, and I have the utmost respect for my colleagues who take this service on.
This basic process is used at every Florida SUS institution, including New College. There are some variations. New College, for instance, has divisions instead of departments, and a provost's advisory committee rather than a tenure and promotion committee, but you get the idea.
So by the time these cases arrived on the desks of Chris Rufo and his fellow partisan hacks, they had already gone through an exhaustive internal and external review process at the university level, and been found to have satisfied all of the relevant tenure criteria.
A note about the Boards of Trustees in the Florida State University System. They consist of 13 members: 6 appointed by the governor, 5 appointed by the SUS Board of Governors, as well as the student body president and the faculty association president.
DeSantis made 6 appointments to the Board back in January. They voted unanimously to deny tenure, and they were the only Trustees to do so. The vote was 6-4 in all five cases. I haven't seen any reporting yet on why three Trustees did not participate in the vote.
So there you have it. Five exceptional academics were voted down by a board of partisans appointed by a governor who's using the nation's highest ranked system of public universities as a political football in his quest for higher office.
Since these professors went up early, they can still apply for tenure again next year. But the more likely outcome is that they'll look for jobs elsewhere, as talented university faculty across Florida are now doing in ever-increasing numbers.
i just got a text from a friend in Florida this morning. Her husband has accepted a teaching position here in Connecticut. She’ll miss the climate, but not the crazy as she so nicely put it.
We had a job opening in our department over the summer. When Dodds was announced multiple people withdrew their applications. It was a nightmare filling the job because multiple people offered the job declined the offer. This after multiple interviews and all that. We wound up with a good hire in the end (which just shows how many qualified people there are for many of these jobs) but his wife did not come here with him so I doubt he’ll stay more than a couple of years.
They want to create Florida’s answer to Wheaton College. There are a few of these schools around the country that are known for indoctrinating students already right-leaning. They want a Florida version of that and creating it. There’s really not much anyone can do to stop them either. I have no idea what the result will be. Will they succeed or (more likely) just make a big mess of things. There are very few of these schools where you can get the liberal arts college experience/education at public school prices, so this and another school in Georgia (I forget the name) and I don’t know of many others. But be clear about this, control it or destroy it…either is fine with the far right.
The real reason faculty need tenure is so they won’t be fired at 50 and replaced with someone right out of school who will ask for less money. That’s the main reason workers fought so hard for things like seniority. I hear people sneer at that, but never anyone who was looking for a job after about 45. Yes, academic freedom is important. Your work should be judged by peers not business people who bought their way onto the board.
Randy sent me this and I love Neil’s answer to the questions Shapiro is asking. “Why do you care” Basically Tyson’s answer was “what is your goal, is it to restrict other people’s freedoms”? He did not let that go, even as hard as Shapiro tried to change the topic to some claim of harm to children. Tyson made clear that it did not matter what area of science it fell into, if it was biological or phycological, the fact is it exists and should be respected. Hugs
One parent, just one complained. It is not enough to deny their own child / children the right to see the play but they have to deny it for all the kids. Too bad if you wanted your child to see the play, the hater parent wins because the laws are set up to support right wing Christian maga parents, not anyone else. The majority are now ruled by the tyranny of the Christian Taliban minority. Hugs
A Texas school district canceled a field trip to see a performance of “James and the Giant Peach” after a single parent complained that actors were dressed in drag.
The parent raised concerns at a recent school board meeting that some actors were playing both men and women in the performance, saying that was inappropriate for children, and the Spring Branch Independent School District canceled the visit,reported KTRK-TV.
“Spring Branch ISD’s pending field trips to the Main Street Theater performance of ‘James and the Giant Peach’ are being canceled due to concerns raised about the age-appropriateness of the performance,” administrators told the TV station.
The play, which is based on the Roald Dahl book, is intended for children as young as first grade, and a spokeswoman for Main Street Theater said the parent who complained was wrong.
“Drag is a different art form,” said Shannon Emerick, the theater’s marketing director. “There is a whole art form that is drag. The amazing thing is the kids just believe the story. They’re not interested in any agendas or anything else anyone thinks is going on.”
A Spring Branch parent agreed, and said that shouldn’t matter either way.
“Drag is not a big deal — it’s theater, it’s art,” said parent Cheri Thomas. “It’s been part of our culture for years.”
Photo: flickr / public domainFILE: Young people holding LGBTQ rainbow flag (Getty Images)
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