Pro-Life Group Working to Ban Drag Queen Story Hours

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WASHINGTON (ChurchMilitant.com) - A pro-life group is attempting to get laws passed that would prohibit libraries from holding immoral and often lewd Drag Queen Story Hours.

At a meeting at the American Library Association's (ALA) public policy office in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, members of the Personhood Alliance presented Dr. Allen Inouye, the senior director, public policy and government relations for the ALA, with two petitions signed by almost 100,000 people requesting they stop promoting Drag Queen Story Hours.

Partnering with LifeSiteNews' LifePetitions platform, Personhood Alliance called Drag Queen events "dangerous and abusive" and demanded the ALA to immediately stop its promotion of the events.

Church Militant spoke with Gualberto Garcia Jones, the president of Personhood Alliance who told us their main concerns were "protecting the innocence of children, protecting the library system itself as a neutral forum, as a depoliticized forum where people can feel safe taking their children to."

"We told them of our plan really to help communities and families around the country correct this issue if they don't correct it themselves," he added.

He said the drag queen events affect libraries' main objectives, which are to improve literacy and to improve access to libraries.

"A lot of people, like myself, the father of five children, wouldn't get within a mile of these Drag Queen Story Hours and that means we wouldn't get within a mile of the library," he said.

Drag Queen events the ALA is encouraging are politicizing the library and endangering the perception that it is a neutral place for people to come and develop literacy.

Garcia Jones said that almost all libraries are taxpayer-funded and they should be responsive to the values of the taxpayers. He explained they are seeking to introduce legislation at all levels of the government, city, state and federal, "to really treat this issue as what it is, which is a form of child abuse."

"When you see the satanic and the debauched nature of these events ... it's something we need to protect those children from," he explained. "We consider this to be child endangerment and a perversion of the innocence of our children."

Garcia Jones said Dr. Inouye was "a little taken aback" by the assertion of child abuse, but they were able to provide concrete examples of lewd activity and convicted sexual predators working at Drag Queen events to gain access to children that citizens' investigations uncovered.

While many assert the rights of parents, Garcia Jones said that when it comes to child endangerment and child abuse, they can affect public policy.

"We have every power to regulate what that moral content that our children are exposed to is," he said. "We have it for movie theaters."

"Obscenity is a local standard," he explained. What is considered obscene in rural America may not be considered obscene in New York City.

He explained that these are not just "freak shows" for progressive communities, "this is a coordinated campaign to infiltrate conservative communities that would not want this in their own libraries but they're pushing it on them to desensitize them."

Inouye told Garcia Jones that it is the "LGBT roundtable" based out of Chicago that determines the policy of the ALA and he would be sending the petitions to them.

"I think we're at the point where we need to go to our legislators," Garcia Jones said. "We're going to keep going and go straight to Congress and to the legislatures to put additional pressure because I don't think they're going to change just out of the reasonableness of our cause."

He said local libraries are usually governed by a county board and he encouraged citizens to go to the library board meetings and state and federal representatives to voice their concerns.

"It's something everybody can do," he said.

Personhood Alliance is also developing a network of affiliates to help gain support and pursue legislative efforts. They are working with members from 25 states and are preparing model legislation.

In the past few months, they added six new affiliates in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Nebraska, North Carolina and Tennessee. Their goal is to have affiliate members for all 50 states to help affect local laws to uphold universal moral principles and need volunteers to lead these groups.

While Personhood Alliance normally works to affect change to uphold the right to life for the unborn, disabled and elderly, the emergence of and rapid spread of Drag Queen Story Hours at libraries nationwide caught their attention.

Personhood Alliance explained their reasoning for fighting against the spread of gender ideology in a blog post, calling it "a direct attack on the Imago Dei, on God's foundational design elements for humankind."

"This is why we cannot address the evil of abortion without considering the breakdown of marriage and family, our culture's worship of sex, and radical feminism's assault on motherhood and the God-ordained role of men," they wrote.

They assert, "The personhood movement provides the only morally consistent answer to all attacks on human life and human dignity," adding:

Our mission as the Church is to uphold the biblical standard and call all of humankind tthat standard. To do so, we must acknowledge the fullness of the Imago Dei and the nature of human personhood. And we must bring to light all ofo the ways the Enemy is working to destroy it—from abortion to euthanasia to drag queen story hours.

The story was updated to include this statement the ALA sent to ChurchMilitant in response to our media query:

The American Library Association serves as a resource for local libraries as they work to mirror the needs and interests of their communities. Because libraries are local institutions, each one makes policies and procedures that fit the needs and resources of their communities. Decisions and programming are made by those who know the community best – local library trustees, library workers and library patrons. The American Library Association encourages libraries to continue to strive to meet the needs of all members of the community and strongly opposes any effort to limit access to information, ideas and programs that patrons wish to explore.