Earlier this week, a teacher in San Francisco was fired after expressing concerns to a reporter that the quarter-million dollars spent on a “woke kindergarten” consultant wasn’t improving student achievement. Shortly before that, an elementary school principal in Oklahoma stepped down because of community backlash after news broke that he had been prosecuted for child pornography. Which of these two stories do you think the legacy media thought was outrageous enough to deserve the national spotlight?
Obviously, the latter.
However, despite linking to a letter from the district to parents addressing the child pornography prosecution, the Washington Post didn’t even inform its readers of the serious charges against the principal. Instead, it tried to gin up outrage because parents were also upset to discover that the principal was a drag queen. If you’d like, you could follow the links in the Washington Post piece to a picture of him in drag making a seductive/surprised face with his fingers edging toward the zipper of leather pouch containing a man’s genitals. But I don’t really recommend that. Nor do I particularly begrudge parents who don’t want their 6-year-old children to ask them why their principal is doing that.
Indeed, parents might wonder whether there is some connection between him performing in drag, as well as participating in drag queen story hour, and the charges against him. According to an affidavit, an informant told the police that the principal had described getting photos of a boy being sexually abused by an adult male, and in 2002, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation found four images of adolescent males performing sex acts on one another on his computer.
A parent could choose to remain agnostic on that question. A parent could also choose to remain agnostic on the question of whether drag queen story hour performers are disproportionately likely to commit child sex offenses — it’s always possible that this impression is an artifact of media selection effects. And a parent could certainly remain agnostic on whether the principal was guilty — he argued that we couldn’t know the ages of the people in his pictures, and maybe the images were computer generated.
That was enough to keep him out of jail. But would any parent, when given the choice between two roughly equally qualified candidates for elementary school principal, go for the one who had been arrested for child pornography?
There is certainly a divide between the preferences of parents and school district bureaucrats. Not to mention one between parents and national education reporters, who thought the child pornography prosecution unworthy of mention but thought it essential to note that Libs of TikTok tweeted the story and the Republican state superintendent called for the principal’s resignation.
But let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that the arrest and prosecution for child pornography never occurred. Would it still be reasonable for parents to prefer that their 6-year-old not attend a school led by someone with a side hustle of performing queer erotic dance?
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo has written an extensive exposé, for anyone who might have needed it, conclusively demonstrating that “Drag Queen Story Hour” is an enterprise intended to promote queer sexual and gender ideology to children. Regardless of whether a drag performer understands himself to be attempting to influence the sexuality of children, this is something that might reasonably perturb a parent.
Parents might also reasonably prefer a clear line in educator professionalism: thou shalt not side-hustle in sexuality.
Earlier this week, for example, news broke that former black impersonator Rachel Dolezal lost her job as a teaching assistant because of her OnlyFans account. The media didn’t seem outraged about that.
Parents have the right to expect a firm policy: no OnlyFans, no drag, no sex work in general from the people entrusted to educate their children — at the very least because students these days eventually find out. Some might even say that such pursuits reveal something about the adult’s moral character that might relate to their fitness to influence children.
Obviously, some will disagree. They might disapprove of OnlyFans but approve of drag queens because the hierarchy of intersectional values suggests that it’s fine to marginalize heterosexual erotica but queer erotica ought to be celebrated. But that’s really not a majority opinion among parents in many places.
Most American communities would prefer principals and teachers who don’t side-hustle in sexuality. And, I think, every community would prefer schools be staffed by those who haven’t been credibly accused of sex crimes against children.
This story says a lot more about the liberal media and their values than it says about Oklahoma. They really do seem to think that it’s outrageous to get upset about sending your child to a school led by someone arrested for child pornography, so long as that person also promotes “queerness” in some other way.
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Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
