06-28-2023, 08:48 PM
(06-28-2023, 05:58 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Yeah, it's not. I have gay friends and family who are concerned about the current trend in this direction. I live in as liberal an area of the country as it gets and I consistently hear concerns about how things are going too far. I get that it's comfortable to dismiss this as far right religious homophobia, but that's just not accurate.
This is not a very compelling argument. There's a huge difference in what children see without permission versus what is taught to them by adults. Kids are supposed to get away with what they can get away with. If you disagree ask yourself this, is there a difference between a child who looks at porn on the internet without permission versus one that is allowed to do so by their parents?
Well, and sorry to Bel, this just isn't true. The Boy Scouts could be described as such as well (and the vast, vast majority of people who participate in scouting would not fall into that category). Note that I am not a fan of the Catholic Church at all, and they deserve way more shit then they've gotten for their role in this abuse. But this is just a lazy "whatabout them" position. When you have to fall back on deflecting to others it only makes your position look weak.
I have the complete opposite perspective. I live in a Red State and the possibility of my son seeing something like this is slim and none. On the list of things I worry about, it really doesn't register, therefore it looks pretty overblown to me. It quite literally looks identical to the right wing arguments that Tom Hanks and Bill Gates drink baby blood and screw human-animal hybrids at adrenachrome parties. The Qanon right has made me pretty numb to any alarmist activity from that side of the aisle, so forgive me if I don't take their word as gospel truth.
As far as what adults choose to expose kids to, I'm not going to be put in a position to defend this if it's happening and explicit. However, it's quite a slippery slope. My mom's sister married a dude from Paris that had paintings of buck naked women throughout their house. I ate Christmas dinner there from the time I was an infant until they moved out to your side of the country. Was he abusing me? Did my parents, knowing that the arguably explicit paintings were present, put me in a position to be groomed?
As for whataboutism, it's hardly that. It's apples to oranges, which is why I bring up the disparity. The instance I gave was actual, documented, physical abuse over decades and thousands of victims. They didn't just see a naked guy dressed up like Barbie. They got violated by men that their community respected and protected who more or less could not be punished in any meaningful way until the bitter end. I suppose my hang-up here is that I just don't see dozens of cases of drag queens being convicted of sexual abuse against minors. I'm sure they exist, just based on sheer probability, but I have yet to see a correlation between the questionable parenting and an outbreak of systematic abuse.
Drag queens are a small group of people within a minority. They are "icky" to most traditional thinking people, therefore people are going to react and believe anything people say about them. It's fine for them to have their opinions, but I still have yet to see evidence that these drag shows are leading to an increase in kids being sexually abused.
