Ky’s new drag show ban is unchristian. Here’s why Christians propose them anyway | Opinion

The Kentucky legislature is considering House Bill 360 which would criminalize public drag shows. The stated intent of the bill is to protect children from “indecent” and “prurient” behavior. Yet, Kentucky, along with every other state, already has laws on the books that cover public nudity, lewdness, and indecent behavior. Drag performances, like every public event, have to comply with this legislation.

Furthermore, we Americans have a very simple solution that parents can use to protect their children from drag shows. They can simply not take their children to drag shows.

The mere fact that someone is dressed in provocative clothes and moves their body in suggestive ways is not a concern to most folks. No one has proposed a bill banning the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, even though they wear ultra short shorts and v-necks that reveal more than they conceal. They shake their hips, kick their feet above their heads, and do the splits! None of this is criminalized. Put a male in that costume and have him embody those moves, and he’ll have the Kentucky legislature on his back.

This suggests that there is nothing wrong with a revealing costume or risqué body moves in themselves. What is deeply offensive, and must be banned, is the combination of the wrong person with the wrong costume.

Even though I am a man, before I lead worship on Sunday morning I slip into a something that looks like a dress. The costuming I wear is purposely odd, or we could say, queer. It signals that in Christian understanding the rigid divisions which separate the human realm from the divine are broken down and become one. The same applies to other divisions within human societies.

New Testament scholar Stephen J. Patterson says Galatians 3:28 contains Christianity’s earliest baptismal vow: “There is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The earliest Christians believed that following Jesus meant that one erased all the boundary markers that separate people into castes.

In the early church Christians gathered as siblings of equal standing. One’s status as a citizen or immigrant was seen as a fictional construct. The same applied for gender and race. The reality is that every person is deeply connected to every other person for the mere fact that we are created and loved by God. Those early Christians were to live in ways that broke down every societal barrier that impeded this vision.

As a priest I communicate this idea of radical equality by covering myself up with the strange garments that every priest wears no matter if they are male, female, or intersex. We all look the same. We are all siblings on equal footing.

A drag performance communicates this differently, but the message is similar. A male performing as a feminine might put on an evening dress. A female performing as masculine might put on work boots and flannel. A male lays bare their body to perform the feminine and the female covers up to put on the masculine. In drag, costuming is used to erase gender boundaries by flipping the codes. Christian vestments erase gender boundaries by swallowing them up. Different tactics; similar goals.

The real intent of the bills banning drag shows is to subordinate queer people and put them in their place. It is a backlash movement that pushes against a culture in which the boundary markers separating the genders are beginning to fade. It is deeply ironic, and also deeply sad to me as a priest, that this backlash movement is often led by people claiming to be traditional Christians. In their efforts to enforce gender boundaries and hierarchies they are fighting against some of Christianity’s earliest and most deeply held beliefs. Even more tragically, their actions are renouncing the earliest Christian baptismal vow.

Charles Halton is Associate Rector of Christ Church Cathedral in downtown Lexington and recipient of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion for his book “A Human-Shaped God: Theology of an Embodied God.”