Should have his bollocks squashed in a vice and be banned from public office following his release from jail in Rwanda.
Off Topic Politics Thread
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No one has suggested that panto has a detrimental impact on children. Other than causing a diversion from the real issues, why have you even mentioned this?
But if you are saying that
Drag Queen = Man in dress
Panto Dame = Man in dress
Therefore Drag Queen = Panto Dame
It's a glib comparison to make. One wonders how many children have been abused by a panto dame? (Clue: None)
But if you ask that question with regards to Drag Queens, who have recently become teachers to young children, you would get a different answer. And this, by the way, is why the issue is being raised now. Not because of the extreme right wing pushing it onto people who hadn't given it a thought before now, DQSH is a relatively new event and people are reacting to it.
Judging by the comments on here I wonder if some posters actually read articles that disagree with their own thoughts. But read the whole article below and you might just learn something.
To paraphrase the defender of all things drag, here are some more lies to lap up.
Drag Queen Story Hour: Who is it for?
Drag queens reading or performing to children have been in the news of late, following numerous cases of shocking and inappropriate behaviour.
This has led to a backlash, and a backlash against the backlash. Some US Democrat lawmakers—like New York mayor Eric Adams or California senator Scott Wiener— feel the problem is that there are not enough men who mock women via grotesque impersonation involved in educating children.
But what’s slipped a bit under the radar amid these revelations is the number of men who dress up as sexual parodies of women in order to read to, or perform in front of, children, who have been arrested for child sexual abuse offences. Until now.
On June 23 it was revealed that Brice Patric Ryschon Williams, who uses the drag name ‘Anastasia Diamond’, had been charged with 43 criminal counts, 25 of which were related to child pornography.
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Williams has participated in several drag events, including GLO Harrisburg, which bills itself as a “safe space for LGBTQ youth”, and the Pride Festival of Central Pennsylvania, where he danced in front of children.
He was only caught after investigators found the name ‘Ana D,’ a shortened version of his drag name, on a Dropbox account that contained child sexual abuse material.
He is at least the seventh man who is either a drag queen or a sponsor of drag queens to be arrested for *****philia offences in recent years.
In 2019 an organisation called Houston MassResistance investigated the small number of drag queens who were reading to children in public libraries - and found that two of them were convicted child sex offenders.
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One of them, William Travis Dees, a former transgender prostitute, served as a ‘greeter’ for young children as they came into the library, even though he had been convicted of sex crimes against four children (aged 4, 5, 6 and 8) and is listed as a “high-risk sex offender.”
This revelation came after Houston city officials had already apologised after it emerged that Alberto Garza, one of the drag queens who had read to children and goes by the name ‘Tatiana Mala-Niña’, has a conviction for sexually assaulting an 8-year-old boy.
Last year, Brett Blomme, the president and CEO of the Cream City Foundation, which operates the Milwaukee Drag Queen Story Hour for local children, was arrested and charged with possessing child pornography depicting the sexual abuse of underage boys, including toddlers. He was later sentenced to nine years in prison.
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Interestingly, various ‘fact checkers’ that claim that “anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in recent months has targeted drag storytimes” have stated that Blomme wasn’t involved in drag queen story hour, as the Cream City Foundation only funded Drag Queen Story Hour and ensured it could receive donations, but didn’t actually run the show.
In 2018 British Airways hired two drag queens to represent the national airline at Brighton Pride on a float that toured the seaside city. One of them, Darren Sewell, aka ‘Crystal Couture’, was convicted of four counts of rape of a boy under 16 in 1999 and broke a court order banning him from contact with children in 2011.
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Sewell’s website stated he performs for people “of all ages”, and had also been employed by Cardiff Pride earlier that year.
In 2013 Robert Clothier, drag name ‘Lady James’, was jailed after being caught in a police sting operation. He thought he was meeting a man and the two of them were to rape the other man’s two children, a boy of 8 and an 11-year-old girl.
When arrested, he was carrying chocolate-flavoured glow-in-the-dark condoms, girl’s underwear, Easter eggs, heart-shaped hairbands and a Lego toy.
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One of the most shocking stories of them all is Kristian Churchill, aka Krystle Caress, who was reported for inappropriate relationships with boys under 16. He was so angry with this that he tried to kill two women by driving into them. Both women survived, but suffered horrific life-altering injuries.
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We know that drag acts are behaving hypersexually in front of children, that many women find them offensive, and that drag remains a contentious issue even among LGB people, but one thing that remains unclear is exactly who benefits from this odd meeting of adult cabaret performers and toddlers. What do very young children gain from exposure to these grotesque parodies of womanhood, with names like ‘Molest A. Child’ or ‘Flow Job’?
The answer is: nothing.
There is one group and one group only that stands to benefit from this disturbing, fashionable trend in education.
Predators.
................................................................
Turn a blind eye or deny it if you wish, but this is what you are defending. You can try to discredit it by comparing it to panto, right wing ravings, hateful bigots or anything else that's convenient, but child welfare should be the priority of everyone regardless of politics.
As Drag Queen Kitty Demure says “Spreading your legs and rubbing your breasts for children doesn't make you a queen it makes you a groomer”.
To expand on the thoughts of other posters regarding panto.
What is it about a pantomime dame that makes them humorous characters? Most likely it is because they are obviously men exaggerating women's features that in the real world would never be believed. Only the most gullible would try to convince themselves and others that a man in woman's clothing is actually a woman.
In the panto the ridiculousness of it all is why they are laughed at but when it happens out on the street in the minds of some people they are real women and you should stop laughing.
Eddie Izzard
Pantomime Dame
What is it about a pantomime dame that makes them humorous characters? Most likely it is because they are obviously men exaggerating women's features that in the real world would never be believed. Only the most gullible would try to convince themselves and others that a man in woman's clothing is actually a woman.
In the panto the ridiculousness of it all is why they are laughed at but when it happens out on the street in the minds of some people they are real women and you should stop laughing.
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Eddie Izzard
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Pantomime Dame
****ing hell. Someone who bought into this **** just killed five people in cold blood at a drag event, and you're still all-in on "drag performers are groomers who are a threat to our children". People are ****ing dead. People are ****ing dead because of the absolute nonsense that you and others are pushing. They haven't even been ****ing buried yet, you absolute ghoul.
If you're going to cut and paste someone else's words why not just link to the article? Otherwise people might think it's your carefully researched and thought through words rather than just something cut and pasted possibly without checking. Here it is: https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/drag-queen-story-hour-who-is-it-for
I do tend to check, so I picked the point where I gave up reading Linehan's article (it all seemed very vague and angry). The name there was William Travis Dees. So I decided to check the simplest way I know how. I searched Google for "William Travis Dees".
There's tons and tons of stuff on right-wing (Jewworldorder.com anyone?) and hard Christian (getreligion.org) websites about William Travis Dees. However, in the first ten pages of results on Google, there's not a single link to a newspaper or TV website reporting that news. You might not regard that as odd. I do. A hundred articles and not one from a newspaper or TV station. Not even Fox or OANN.
The one outlier in the results is a medium blogpost: https://medium.com/@miralazine/debu...nformation-drag-queen-story-hour-727b722533f8 which asserts (I can't check) that there's no record of William Travis Dees on the Texas sex-offenders register and that in Texas even if you're under 16 you end up on that if convicted. There's more in there but that's where I stopped. That article might be a lie but combined with the lack of credible new site links on the original story, it was time for scepticism to kick in.
I haven't the time or inclination to check every one of Graham Linehan's claims but this one doesn't pass the smell test, I'm afraid, so I feel content that his words maybe shouldn't be taken as gospel. I'm not saying he's wrong or that he's just repeating unchecked "facts" from right-wing and hard Christian propagandists, just that I'm not losing any sleep over his claims about William Travis Dees.
To clarify, I'm not trying "to discredit it by comparing it to panto, right wing ravings, hateful bigots or anything else that's convenient" - I'm just wondering if the story is true given the lack of any independent reporting and the apparent lack of any substantive reporting.
If you can find something about this case from a reputable source, I'm happy to be proven wrong but it'll require evidence, not repeated assertions.
Vin
I guess a simple question here (to which some might well say “yes”) is would they be ok with a story hour being presented by biological women dressed in the same way that drag queens often dress. Bringing in a glamour model (not that those exist in quite the same way as the early 2000s), stripper or similar to read
And would they be ok with young children pulled up on stage at a strip club or a hooters or whatever. I’m sure I saw something the other day to this affect about the hooters part being considered unacceptable but the drag show fine. (But it was only in passing and so I couldn’t investigate for bias)
Perhaps this already happens. Or perhaps the most of the sort of people who complain about the drag stuff would also complain about it in my scenario.
I may try and look more into that detailed reposted article later. I did note that in the reply stating it was unreliable that only one case was talked about. Now is that because all the others are actually true? Or only one was checked?
And would they be ok with young children pulled up on stage at a strip club or a hooters or whatever. I’m sure I saw something the other day to this affect about the hooters part being considered unacceptable but the drag show fine. (But it was only in passing and so I couldn’t investigate for bias)
Perhaps this already happens. Or perhaps the most of the sort of people who complain about the drag stuff would also complain about it in my scenario.
I may try and look more into that detailed reposted article later. I did note that in the reply stating it was unreliable that only one case was talked about. Now is that because all the others are actually true? Or only one was checked?
Only one checked. And here's why I only checked one. I gave up on Linehan due to how vague, angry and repetitive the stories sounded and decided to check the name he'd just mentioned. I also have a life off this forum with plenty enough to do so I didn't check every single claim (which Linehan - who wrote this piece - might reasonably have been expected to have done, or the person cutting and posting his blogpost on here might have done). I checked just the one and it didn't stack up so I feel justified in treating the whole lot with suspicion. As always, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. At the end of my post I clarified what limited conclusion I was drawing:
"To clarify, I'm not trying 'to discredit it by comparing it to panto, right wing ravings, hateful bigots or anything else that's convenient' - I'm just wondering if the* story is true given the lack of any independent reporting and the apparent lack of any substantive reporting.
If you can find something about this case from a reputable source, I'm happy to be proven wrong but it'll require evidence, not repeated assertions."
Vin
*In retrospect I should have written "this" rather than "the".
Janey Godley sums it up quite well:
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So, ex-Tory MP Owen Patterson, who didn't want us to be a part of the European Court of Human Rights, is taking the UK to the ECHR...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63714944
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63714944
Ooh be careful about what circles you share that in. Especially the top one. Since in some places if you dare suggest it people get very angry. Some unreasonable (and indeed highly toxic) people are really not fans of the “not all men” argument.
Don’t give a ****, personally.
I have indeed seen it a few times. Typically when a woman suffers some kind of horrific attack or abuse from a man and someone posts "men need to learn xxx...", only for the first twenty responses to be idiots posting #notallmen, thus serving to undermine the original commenter. I feel anger then might be quite understandable.
I've not really noticed it apart from circumstances like that. Do you have examples?
Not really. Just from general browsing on places like Reddit and Twitter where it just seems to be extend beyond the scenario you state - which is admittedly where the whole thing originated
Basically now the annoyed reaction to “not all men” now seems to apply when far more low key complaints are made about men which are then disputed by other men (you know, things in the dating sphere where the posters are trying to deflect from their own bad choices rather than those related to violent crimes)
To be fair, the example I used wasn’t just about men. It was meant to convey the indisputable fact that the vast majority of the human race, whatever their gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, political allegiance, football team, or favourite snack food, are all unlikely to start randomly assaulting or killing their fellow humans.
There are always exceptions on the extreme fringes of any category of people, but that fact remains a fact. Anyone who claims differently is deliberately trying to increase the general hatred for a particular category, for whatever weird reason.
Which is ridiculous. The rate of ****philia among the general population is horrifying. I can spend an hour compiling a list of people convicted of sex offenses against minors who were politicians that would take up a whole page on this forum. Or priests. Or Boy Scout leaders. Or sport coaches. Or members of the Roya[CARRIER LOST]. It should be shockingly and sadly easy to compile a list of people from any given group that has produced a large number of sex offenders against minors. And any of those lists from the groups above will be better-sourced and significantly longer than those offered by the people that IOAG is copying and pasting their information from. Because of the way statistics work in a large sample, anything that is endemic in 1% of the population becomes a ready source of anecdata.
And yet, he's citing a handful of instances so weak that i) the same person is cited multiple times, and ii) another person appears to not exist. That's really weird. I wonder if IOAG cares (spoiler: he doesn't care in the slightest, having his arguments being grounded in reality has never mattered).
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Fair play to this Tory MP for asking Cruella Braverman questions about how a hypothetical 16 year old African boy, seeking asylum in the UK, would go about applying.
https://fb.watch/gZKED9O8fe/
https://fb.watch/gZKED9O8fe/
For people who don't use FB, here's a link to the video via Larry the Cat. It's painful but vital to watch:
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She completely destroyed her own argument there, and in the end tried to get her Permanent Secretary to bail her out, which he also failed to do.