Q Toon: Unspeakable Acts

Oh, and of course, money.

A student group at West Texas A&M University planned to put on a drag show to raise funds for the Trevor Project, a charity that works to prevent LGBTQ+ suicides. Once upon a time and place, that would seem to be a laudable move, but not now and not in Texas.

WTA&MU President Walter Wendler banned the show with the novel argument that drag is “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny” comparable to “blackface,” and that drag performers “stereotype women in cartoon-like extremes for the amusement of others and discriminate against womanhood.”

The student group moved their fund raiser off campus, and took the university to court. Unfortunately, that landed their case in the court of right-wing activist Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, appointed to the North Texas District Court by Donald Joffrey Trump in 2017.

Kacsmaryk found that drag is likely not protected expression under the First Amendment, but rather “vulgar and lewd” “sexualized conduct” that may be outlawed to protect “the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.” In short, he concluded that drag fails to convey a message, while explaining all the reasons why he’s offended by the message it conveys.

Your humble scribbler has drawn Mr. Kacsmaryk before. Last year, he found that health care professionals have every right to refuse to treat transgender patients. When Trump elevated him to the bench, he was policy advocate and deputy general counsel for First Liberty, a Talibangelist advocacy group based in Plano, Texas, to push that agenda exactly.

Kacsmaryk's ruling in this particular case is a sharp break from precedent: judges, even those in Red states such as Florida, Montana, and Tennessee, have ruled against state attempts to ban drag performances. The language of Kacsmaryk's ruling goes well beyond Wendler's feminist defense of his ban — perhaps that stuff was too woke for the judge — to assert his own revulsion against any departure from strict gender norms as the foundation of his bench-based legislation.

This case may well be appealed, perhaps all the way to the Supreme Court. If any of the right-wing activist justices with which the highest court in the land has been packed still profess any belief in constitutional originalism, I hope they remember that our Founding Fathers actually had a fondness for wigs and petticoats.