Geese and Ganders and Drag Queen Story Hours

Fallout from the David French-Sohrab Ahmari debate continues online. I've still not watched it. Most accounts have French trouncing Ahmari. Given French's courtroom experience, such an outcome comes as no surprise. He's a debater in a way Ahmari is not.

Much of the debate, apparently (I'll judge for myself later), revolves around Ahmari's horror at Drag Queen Story Hour, events at public libraries where drag queens read to children whose parents take them to that event. The event also figures large in Ahmari's original jeremiad against "Frenchism."

DQSH figures as something like a one-dimensional Rorschach test for conservatives like Ahmari. To them, the very idea is so viscerally, obviously, and immediately repellent that it's hard for for them to conceive of how anyone with a modicum of moral sense could think otherwise. For most other people the event barely breaks the surface of awareness; they place it somewhere on the spectrum between harmless and laudable. To this group, reactions from folk like Ahmari appear bizarre.

I'm fascinated by such worldview gaps, the stunned, how can you possibly think that? dumbfoundedness with which people on either side of the gap view each other.

I'm in the group of people who think it grand for anyone, drag queens included, to spread pro-literacy messages on a volunteer basis. But of course, I also think it morally neutral for folk identified as men to dress in female drag. Indeed, I applaud drag queens' commitment to aesthetically beautiful self-expression and their bending of strict gender norms.

In such convictions, too, I stand on one side of a worldview gap. Staring back at my from the other side are conservatives who see flouting gender norms as a pernicious attack upon the foundations of moral culture. Instability in gender, they would say, leads to instability in society generally. Children exposed to such gender-bending grow up without a clear image of who they can or should be as men and women. (That is, as cis-men and -women in twenty-first century USAmerican, Christian, middle-class culture, etc.)

Nor are such events bad generally, Ahmari suggests. Insofar as DQSH gets leveraged as a woke, pro-diversity move, he argues, resistance against it from conservative Christians gets cast not as a difference of taste but as bigotry. DQSH thus effectively forces those who disagree with drag (or who take issue with the acceptance and normalization of LGBTQ+ identities) into a catch-22: applaud these events that you see as evil or be branded as evil by popular culture. Once so branded, Ahmari says, conservative Christians will be themselves discriminated against.

Again, most people--David French included--don't see anything like the kind of existential threat Ahmari sees here. And, pressed to say exactly what he'd want done in response to DQSH, Ahmari and his supporters have (from my perspective) tended to be vague. Does he want the government to intervene? Arrest the drag queens for daring to read to children? Arrest the parents for sending their kids to such an event? Forbid libraries from hosting events featuring drag queens?

In his written responses to Ahmari, French rightly points out that such steps would set awful precedents. Deny drag queens in one library, and a dozen other libraries might deny Bible study meetings. French's liberalism carries a strong "good for the goose, good for the gander" feel. Ahmari seems to want to maintain that the goose and the gander are qualitatively different, but from what I can tell he offers no distinguishing criteria beyond his own self-evident-to-himself beliefs (i,e., "What the Roman Catholic Church says is right").

I'm not sure how Ahmari could respond to French's points without doing away with the idea of liberal equality of application (the goose-gander factor) altogether.

I suspect, actually, that that's what Ahmari has on offer.

More tomorrow,

JF