Jail for drag-queen story hour?

Honestly, I don’t “get” drag-queen story hour. When John was young we took him to the library often, and made sure he knew all the librarians and thought of them as his friends — but I strongly doubt that we would have taken him to drag-queen story hour. It’s just … I don’t know what. “Weird” isn’t exactly the right word, but that’s the sense of it.

But drag-queens are part of the tax-paying public that makes libraries possible, and have the same right everybody else has to reserve and use the library’s public meeting rooms, and the parents who take their children to drag-queen story hour are exercising GOP-approved discretion to raise their children as they think best, so why is the Missouri GOP threatening librarians with jail if they permit such events?

Public libraries that display “age-inappropriate material” could lose state funding and even see their librarians fined or jailed, under a bill proposed by a Missouri lawmaker.

The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Ben Baker, a southwest Missouri Republican, said Thursday that the “Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act” did not target books but was drafted in reaction to Drag Queen Story Hours being held across the state.

Like I said, I don’t “get” it and probably wouldn’t have taken John when he was young — but I do understand that this sort of censorship is exactly why libraries are important and must be protected. I hope Missouri lawmakers don’t humiliate themselves by passing this law and setting-up years of court fights they will inevitably lose.

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