It’s the latest craze in public education across the nation: drag queen shows in public high schools during the school day.
One of the shows was held at Hempfield High School in Landisville, Pennsylvania. The school hosted several performers who were there without the knowledge of any parents.
The co-advisor to the student club that hosted the event shared the Instagram accounts of all four of the performers with her students. Each of those accounts on the social media platform contained sexually suggestive content.
Another high school hosting a drag queen show was Ankeny High School in Ankeny, Iowa.
Two drag queens and one drag king came for their end-of-the-year meeting. The event happened even though there was no authorization from administrators at the school.
One of the guests gave a speech in which he tried to help students “navigate their gender identity journey.”
This new push to “help” children determine the implications of their sexuality regarding gender is mind-boggling to many.
A theologian explains
Carl Trueman, a professor of Biblical and religious studies at Grove City College in Pennsylvania and author of the book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self has an explanation that revolves around his idea of “expressive individualism.”
This kind of thinking is really what is providing the foundation for events like the ones with drag queens recently, he explains.
Trueman believes that expressive individualism is the dominant worldview about identity in the modern Western world. “Essentially, the expressive individualist intuits that the true self is that which we are inside, the inner emotions and psychological feelings that we experience,” he writes.
Truman believes that the authentic individual is the person who can act in public in that very way that they feel on the inside.
The professor says that we are in a situation today in our culture where it is required to affirm an individual in a public performance because if we don’t do so, it denies that someone is who they think they are and that, “in a nutshell, is where the Western world is today,” Trueman said.
He links the authority that our society gives to feel about our sex and gender to previous centuries of Western philosophy. The average person in America may have no idea consciously that they have been shaped by these values.
Trueman bases his book and his ideas on the intellectual system derived from the teachings of people like Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich. In more recent history, these same ideas have been validated by the teachings of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, according to Trueman.
“But few people read these characters — more relevant to the man or woman in the street is the way the message of a highly sexualized expressive individualism is preached by commercials, movies, soap operas, and sitcoms,” he said.
The theology professor focuses his writing on why the LGBTQ community feels the need to spread their worldview to young people and children in the school system.
He writes that children are the “perfect target” for activist groups who desire to see the “subversion of the parent-child bond and the consequent strengthening of the power of a progressive establishment,” Trueman noted.
He said that the parent-child bond is most likely the most important in society. If that relationship can be dissolved, then a void is created with an opportunity for a whole new value system.
Trueman writes that if we destroy to bond between parents and children, “you have destroyed the most powerful and influential pre-political bond of influence and loyalty that stands in the way of the various lobby groups trying to drive the direction of our culture.”
