Fox News host Laura Ingraham has made a career out of fear-mongering. Her most recent attacks have centered undocumented immigrants, but now LGBTQ+ people are in her cross-hairs. Again.
The focus of her concern? Drag queen story hours, which she said are “popping up all over the country.” So, in her usual heavy-handed fashion, she invited the leader of the California chapter of a virulently anti-LGBTQ hate group to “debate” the issue on her Podcast Thursday, writes David Badash in a story published by AlterNet.
Drag queen story hours are becoming increasingly popular at libraries across the country, helping kids to understand that diversity is to be supported, not crushed under the weight of prejudice.
But this is lost on Ingraham and her guest, Arthur Schaper, head of MassResistance of California. For Ingraham and people like Schaper, diversity is an anathema.
“The bottom line is this: you have adult homosexual men, adult entertainers going into a public library, reading to children,” Schaper said on her podcast, The Ingraham Angle. “I mean, that alone should not only be setting off alarms but people should be demanding this to be canceled even before it starts.”
But that wasn’t all Schaper had to say, and he resorted to homophobia of the worst sort.
“We’re not talking about diversity here, we’re talking about deviance,” he said. “We’re talking about perverse and destructive lifestyles being animated or advertised to children as if it’s normal. We’re talking about degenerate, perverse entertainment.”
Schaper, an avid Trump supporter, is also virulently anti-immigrant and runs his chapter with a well-known white supremacist. And MassResistance has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
This isn’t the first time Ingraham has dropped anti-LGBTQ misinformation bombs, either. She’s been doing it for years on her podcast, radio show, and on her Fox News program, also called The Ingraham Angle, Media Matters for America reports.
But Schaper wasn’t her only guest. Bill Donohue, of The Catholic League, absurdly compared Drag Queen Story Hour to NAMBLA (the creepy North American Man Boy Love Association). Schaper also said trans youth and those teaching children about gender identity are “an assault on nature and nature’s God.”
At one point Ingraham claimed gender fluidity is a “contrived issue” and that people are pandering to liberal reporters to turn public libraries into “political and social transformation instruments.”
“Well I think when you look at this new, you know, again — contrived controversy, and it started as a group of activists in San Francisco in 2015, who decided ‘How do we sell this gender fluidity concept, and get publicity, and grow this movement?'” she says. “They grow it by starting this drag queen story hour organization in San Francisco in 2015, happens to coincide with the rise of Donald Trump.”
It’s nice to know that something good has come out of his presidency.
“They start this organization, and then they export it across the United States, and get all these liberal reporters to write pieces about these intolerant Christian conservatives and Catholic groups who are expressing outrage that even the public libraries are turning into these little political and social transformation instruments.”
It’s at this point that Donohue lapsed into his weird NAMBLA-drag queen comparison and further attacked LGBTQ people:
“And they’re organized with one purpose, to sexually molest little boys and girls, mostly boys. And they are — they organize and meet with the purpose of molesting kids in public libraries, at public expense, and defended by the American Civil Liberties Union. So it’s not — it’s not a great leap.”
At one point Ingraham mentioned that “people have legitimate concerns” about drag queens reading to kids, and that she’s just “trying to figure out what’s going on.”
She even seemed to insinuate drag queens might be dangerous.
“What’s the point of doing this with kids?” she asked.
The “point” is lost on this woman and her guests who want to live in a cookie-cutter world where everyone looks and dresses the same.
The “point” is to teach kids that diversity is a thing. And that diversity is actually normal and healthy.
Arthur Schaper went on TV tonight to spread FEAR. He may well know people have no choice over being queer, but he wants them to be AFRAID to acknowledge it. He wants to encourage rejection and encourage discrimination. He does not value the lives of queer kids.
— Zack Ford (@ZackFord) June 14, 2019
And at least one Twitter user made note of the advertisers who aired commercials on her show. So that we can boycott them.
Tonight, Laura Ingraham had an anti-LGBT extremist on her show where he promoted a book called "The Health Hazards of Homosexuality"
These companies ran ads:@coravin@GetRoman@StarKistCharlie@GotPrint@BauschLomb@SandalsResorts@lifelock@smartmouth@tecovas@CarfaxReports pic.twitter.com/38rWKGgOsA
— jordan (@JordanUhl) June 14, 2019
As the video below explains, drag queen story hour is a chance for kids to learn about diversity in a way that’s fun and not pressurizing. It gives kids the tools to deal with life’s many challenges. Including, most hopefully, the tools to deal with prejudice and hostility.
Drag Queen Story Hour at NYPL The New York Public Library
由 BuzzFeed Video 发布于 2017年6月30日周五
Featured image courtesy of the video above
