Pride Drag Story Hour Canceled After Marco Rubio Calls It 'Sexually Charged'
Military.com reports. Drag performer Stacey Teed was set to do the reading. But the event is now off.Rubio, a Republican U.S.
senator from Florida, said it was canceled after he wrote a letter last week to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall saying it was a “gross abuse of taxpayer funding to place children in a sexualized environment.”“It is completely insane for Ramstein AFB to use on-installation resources for rituals like ‘Drag Queen Story Time,’” Rubio wrote. “These inappropriate events are extremely divisive at home for good reason; in all cases, they place young children in close proximity with adults who are intentionally and explicitly sexualized.”Rubio also said service members and families stationed outside the U.S.
often have no alternatives to on-base libraries if they disagree with library policies — although, of course, no family would be required to attend the story hour.He objected to a book featured at a reading last year, The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish; its author had expressed a hope that it would encourage children “to get a little practice shaking their hips or shimmying their shoulders.”“As I hope you can agree, decisions over children and their bodies should be left to moms and dads serving our nation, not mediated through publicly funded propaganda on U.S.
Air Force bases,” Rubio wrote. “The last thing parents serving their nation overseas should be worried about, particularly in a theater with heightened geopolitical tensions, is whether their children are being exposed to sexually charged content simply because they visited their local library.”Rubio, who sought the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, has been a U.S.
