ABC

ABC Shamed Into Postponing Drag Event for Children

8 February 2024

4.2 MINS

Promising pushback from the taxpaying public has persuaded the ABC to postpone its perverse performance.

Australian state media has been forced to postpone a Sydney event at which adult men dressed as sexualised women would have been filmed reading LGBT-themed books to children as young as three.

The Daily Telegraph reports:

The ABC has backflipped on a controversial decision to organise a Drag Queen Story event for children as young as three in a Sydney suburban library after questions were raised about its “appropriateness” and “gender indoctrination”.

The national broadcaster had made the call-out on social media for children aged from three to five years to attend a four-hour event at Rockdale Library, in Sydney’s south, on February 22 as part of Mardi Gras.

However the ABC said it had a “hateful and offensive response” to its plans and it was “considering how we can safely host it”.

The head of the ABC Queer and Mardi Gras presenter Monique Schafter posted in a “Rainbow Families Community” Facebook group that: “The ABC is filming a drag story time event for the 2024 Mardi Gras broadcast and is looking for children between ages 3-5 years to take part. If you and your tiny humans are interested in taking part, please email.”

But after a backlash online, and questions raised by gender critical feminists, Christian groups, Liberal Senator Alex Antic and the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), the ABC cancelled the plans.

ABC

Australians Are Funding ABCQueer?

Ms Schafter is the Content Lead for ABCQueer, a division of the taxpayer-funded broadcaster that employs a team of content creators to encourage young Australians in living out lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer lifestyles.

The division began in 2020 as an Instagram page but has since expanded to include TV collaborations, programming on the video-on-demand service ABC iview, a monthly newsletter, and a podcast euphemistically named ‘Innies + Outies’.

Increasingly eager to push sex-themed content on the nation, the ABC has stepped forward as the official host broadcaster for the 2024 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. The postponed event was to be part of its Mardi Gras coverage.

Significantly, the ABC did not make its planned event at Rockdale Library known to the public. Instead, LGBT families and their “tiny humans” were canvassed for recruitment via a private Facebook group.

ABC

After being shamed into suspending the event, the ABC lashed out at the people who fund their organisation, declaring in a statement posted to its website:

The ABC condemns the hateful and offensive response we have received from some individuals in response to the callout for this event. The event will no longer be held at the Rockdale Library and the ABC is considering how we can safely host it.

The ABC invited families from within the LGBTQIA+ community to participate in a Drag Queen Story Time event which would be filmed as part of our Mardi Gras coverage. These events are designed for families and are regularly held in public spaces.

The ABC’s Indefensible Behaviour

The ABC’s statement reveals far more about the staff running the national broadcaster than its forced benefactors — the Australian taxpaying public — who this week finally had enough and pushed back against the ABC’s excesses.

First, by “hateful and offensive response”, what the ABC really means is “a response that we hate and that offends us”. They wanted to film themselves indoctrinating and initiating children into the rainbow cult, and they wanted everyday Australians to pay for it. To be told “no” hurt their feelings.

Even if a minority of the ABC’s critics were rude or abusive (we have no access to these comments and must simply take the ABC at its word), what the ABC statement deliberately avoids addressing is the very reasonable concerns of the majority.

Most Australians oppose the sexualisation of children by grown men in dresses and make-up, and those who are unafraid to say so regularly communicate their concerns in civil and sober terms.

By avoiding substantive criticisms and instead focussing only on “some individuals” who were allegedly rude, the ABC used a predictable playbook, studiously indulging in at least three logical fallacies:

Guilt by association: Unfairly attributing the characteristics of a few individuals to an entire group.

Hasty generalisation: Drawing a conclusion based on insufficient evidence, often by generalising from a small sample size.

Straw Man: Misrepresenting or distorting someone’s argument to make it easier to attack or refute.

What the ABC did not and cannot do is provide a mature reply to Australians who disagree with the sexual indoctrination of children at the taxpayer’s expense — because there is no defence for such behaviour.

What is Drag Queen Story Hour?

Another claim in the ABC’s statement deserves interrogation: “These events are designed for families and are regularly held in public spaces.”

This is also from a predictable playbook. Western Marxist revolutionaries are very skilled at normalising customs that were once unthinkable in polite society, and then claiming that because those customs have been normalised that everyone should accept them.

Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) is undeniably one such custom.

While DQSH has roots that go back a century, its intellectual foundations were laid by queer activist Gayle Rubin. Rubin viewed drag queens as sexual revolutionaries, and saw their task as helping to disorder public sexuality and ultimately liberate sexual minorities — including pedophiles — from the moral constraints of the Christian West.

Drag Queen Story Hour itself is a brainchild of queer activist Michelle Tea, who began the movement in 2015, purportedly as a way to promote reading, diversity and inclusion.

However, as argued by Harris Kornstein, who authored the movement’s defining manifesto, ‘Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood’, DQSH has deeper aims: Teaching children “how to live queerly”; bringing “queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children”; disrupting the “binary between womanhood and manhood”; seeding the room with “gender-transgressive themes”; and breaking the “reproductive futurity” of the “nuclear family” and the “sexually monogamous marriage”.

Whatever else might be said about Drag Queen Story Hour, one thing cannot be denied: These are adult male transvestites who want to share their sexuality with children.

Why the ABC is forcing taxpayers to fund such perversion is anyone’s guess.

But the pushback is encouraging. And Australians should keep speaking up until the entire Drag Queen Story Hour movement, along with its eager apologists at the ABC, are shamed all the way back into the shadows.

___

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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3 Comments

  1. Jim Twelves 8 February 2024 at 8:27 am - Reply

    Kurt, forensic, respectful, balanced and informative. Thank you so much.

  2. Pauline Tondl 8 February 2024 at 10:08 am - Reply

    “considering how we can safely host it”, the ABC apparently said.
    I wonder what they mean by “safely” ??

    Does the ABC believe (oops, there’s that ‘faith’ word!) it’s “safe” for children of any age to be shown BY EXAMPLE what sexual perversion is ??

    Do caring parents think it’s “safe” to call perverse sexual behaviour entertaining, interesting and/or helpfully informative for their precious children ??

    How degraded must our society become before leaders admit perversity is the wrong way to go ?

    • Jim Twelves 9 February 2024 at 9:23 am - Reply

      Pauline, I could not agree more. We can point the finger at the ABC’s bias/perversion etc, we can point the finger at our politicians who sign off on the ABC’s funding, but do we point the finger at ourselves for electing these politicians?

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