A rightwing Idaho group has drafted a bill that would “ban drag performances in all public venues,” and plans to have the bill introduced once the state Legislature comes into session in January, the Idaho Capital Sun reports. Blaine Conzatti, president of the “Idaho Family Policy Center,” claims the proposed ban on personal expression anywhere in public would be perfectly legal under Idaho’s state constitution, which mentions morality and there you go, it’s legal.
What First Amendment? There are culture wars to pursue!
Conzatti’s group was only formed in 2021, but the Family Fear Foundation is already becoming a familiar player in rightwing culture wars in Idaho. The Family Policy Center produced Idaho’s legislation that copied the Texas abortion ban enforced by “bounties” on abortion providers earlier this year. Conzatti told the Capital Sun that a bill banning public drag performances is ready to go and should be introduced right away once the Lege is in session, but he declined to show the paper a copy of the bill or say which legislators will be introducing it.
He also has the official anti-trans language down pat, claiming that drag is by nature a “sexual” performance, which is bullshit, but that’s what he said: “No child should ever be exposed to sexual exhibitions like drag shows in public places, whether that’s at a public library or a public park.” We should point out that this is a classic example of “begging the question,” since it relies on the unsupported assertion that a drag show is a “sexual exhibition” in the first place.
The bill is part of the far Right’s politically motivated moral panic over the existence of LGBTQ+ people, a cynical effort to gin up controversy and votes over the supposed lifelong damage that might result from little Christian children knowing that other people exist and have value. Locally, the perpetually aggrieved have been freaking out since a Boise Pride festival in September, which had been scheduled to include a “drag kids” performance by kids aged 12 to 17, who’d been planning to wear sparkly outfits and lip-synch to pop music, and if that isn’t a sex act what is? (Oh yes, actual sex acts are.)
The performance was postponed indefinitely after professional shit-stirrer Christopher Rufo directed his Twitter flying monkeys at the event’s corporate sponsors, many of whom withdrew their support. Dorothy Moon, chair of the Idaho Republican Party, also demanded sponsors pull their financial support for what she claimed was “the sexualization of our children and the perverse idea that children should engage in sexual performances with adult entertainers.” The organizers of Boise Pride received death threats, as is mandatory these days.
Again, all over sparkly dresses and lip-synching. To Kelly Clarkson. If anyone’s sexualizing children, it’s the creeps who imagine a song and dance act is the preface to a child sex orgy.
Now, just in case the scourge of children possibly hearing a book read to them by someone in drag wasn’t enough of a threat to civilization, Conzatti also had an outright lie ready to justify a ban on drag performances, too, the Capital Sun notes:
Conzatti also cites a drag performance in Coeur d’Alene in June as another example of public indecency, when a performer was accused of exposing himself during a Pride in the Park event. After complaints, the local prosecutor’s office determined the video was edited to look like the performer had exposed himself when he had not. The performer has since filed a defamation lawsuit against North Idaho blogger Summer Bushnell over the incident, according to reporting from the Coeur d’Alene Press.
Feels like that needs some follow-up, though; if the reporter didn’t know it was bullshit when Conzatti said it, was there an attempt to contact him once it was clear that never happened? In any case, it’s very important we protect children from anything that might be modified to seem obscene, like that Twitter account that adds cussy captions to scenes from Star Trek.
The bill would almost certainly be unconstitutional, since we’re fairly certain the First Amendment doesn’t allow the prohibition of an entire form of expression, even if you say it’s “sexual” really loudly. But for shits and giggles — to be banned in Idaho in 2024 — Conzatti thinks Idaho’s state constitution provides all the justification you need, as do US Supreme Court decisions from long ago. The Family Panic Center circulated a petition calling on the Lege to ban drag performances,
citing a section of the Idaho Constitution that states the “first concern of all good government is the virtue and sobriety of the people and the purity of the home.” It says the Legislature should “further all wise and well-directed efforts for the promotion of temperance and morality.”
“There were many Supreme Court decisions from the 19th century dealing with public virtue and how sexual practices should not take place in public because it degraded public virtue,” Conzatti said.
There are one or two potential problems with that reasoning, we think. As we like to note, Yr Doktor Zoom is not a lawyer, but we’re fairly certain that those general principles about virtue and sobriety and morality don’t really have the force of law, and beyond that, a state constitution’s very broad claims about morality can’t exactly overrule the US Constitution. As for Conzatti’s second point, we’re fairly sure that not even the Roberts Court would be willing to stretch the meaning of “sexual practices” to include a drag performance that doesn’t have any sex in it. Like, not yet at least.
Still, the bill certainly has the potential to cause all sorts of mischief it it somehow became law. Even in Idaho, that may be unlikely, depending on whether the state Senate is taken over in the midterms by far-right loonies like the House has. Remember that last year’s bill imposing life sentences for providing gender-affirming care to minors died in the state Senate without even being considered, as did another bill that could have sent librarians to prison for letting minors check out sex books (defined as anything Idaho wingnuts think is dirty). Big surprise: Both had the support of the Idaho Family Policy Fuckers, too.
Read More:
Hey Idaho Librarians, YOU’RE IN JAIL!
Idaho House Passes Very Sane Bill: Life In Prison For Giving Medical Treatment To Trans Teens
No, Really, What’s Up With Idaho?
If what’s left of the institutional guardrails fall, however, as gender law expert Alejandra Carballo points out on the Twitter machine, the bill could — depending on its exact wording — “effectively criminalize being trans and/or gender non-conforming in public.” It’s certainly not difficult to imagine that the “Christian” nationalists pushing to force LGBTQ people back into the closet might go for the broadest definition possible, to scare trans people out of public life. As Carballo notes,
This is exactly what the Stonewall riots were about. The police raiding gay bars and arresting drag queens and trans people for not wearing clothes associated with their sex assigned at birth. That’s effectively what the Idaho Family Policy Center wants.
In conclusion, I am finally starting to think it might make more sense to get the fuck out of this godforsaken state. Lucky thing I am lazy and hate moving, so I will probably end up staying and fighting for a while longer, the end.
[Idaho Capital Sun / Boise State Public Radio / Idaho Capital Sun / LGBTQ Nation]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please give $5 or $10 a month to help us keep you on top of all the stupid, and to help Dok Zoom’s Go Bag Fund. I see rent in Osaka might be cheaper than in Boise, hmm…
