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Dolly Parton might sadly be gone, but her legacy as one of America's greatest continues to live on in many ways. Today being a victory for free speech, with Texas Senate Bill 12, the "drag show ban" being ruled unconstitutional by Reagan appointee judge David Hittner for the pretty obvious reason that it violated the first amendment.
Dolly Parton's legacy is intertwined in this ruling in a few ways.
She is cited by Hittner as one example of ‘erotic’ elements in countless popular performances that could be subject to both civil and criminal penalties under S.B. 12,” citing Dolly Parton specifically with "“as a voluptuous sex symbol because of her big hair, flamboyant clothes and breast exposure”.
One of the plaintiffs in the case, Brigitte Bandit is a drag queen known for doing Dolly Parton impressions.
Parton herself had given Bandit a guitar covered in rhinestones after Bandit had testified at the Texas capitol against the drag ban.
It is important to note that the drag ban was on its face, "neutral" and didn't mention drag at all. The phrasing used was "sexually oriented performances", as Texas had tried to get around any textual blatant viewpoint discrimination. But expanding it to cover typical drag shows as stated for the intent required such vague wording that it could also possibly impact things exactly like Dolly Parton. If a impersonation of Dolly Parton by a man is too sexual, than Dolly Parton is too sexual.
Some other examples Hittner used included Miley Cyrus twerking, Lady Gaga, some more revealing cosplays, and swimmers in attractive bikinis. And even before the law was put into action, apparently The Texas House Research Organization had specifically listed cheerleading alongside concerts and theatrical performances as potential threats. It's so broad and the problems so well known ahead of time that it's possible this law was intended to fail to begin with, that it was red meat for censor loving voters.
Regardless of intent, there's one interesting takeaway from this then. If the state has to textually prohibit a large berth of standard constitutionally protected mainstream entertainment in order to target and censor drag shows, then the problem exists entirely within the attempted censoring of drag shows. If any drag show had a unique and non protected issue, that particular issue can be dealt with specific and focused laws.
Hittner also includes an answer for those who don't wish for them or their kids to see a drag show. Don't go. If you find something offensive, instead of using big government to censor it just don't show up and watch it. You have every right to boycott whatever you please.
This argument is like saying that if an impersonation of Barack Obama by a white man is racist, then being Barack Obama is racist.
That doesn't follow. In many contexts the act of impersonation itself is sexual, above and beyond the fact that there's sexuality because of the target of the impersonation.
This. For the most part, drag queens don't just "look like" women. If that's all they were doing, most people wouldn't care (and how would you even know?). Instead, they do a ridiculously exagerated caricature of women. Ridiculously stuffed breasts, buttocks, falsetto voice, etc. Some have described it as "girl face," like the "black face" that people used to do in minstrel shows to make fun of black people. It's completely different from how actual trans women dress, or how actors dress to present as a realistic woman. It makes for an incredibly cheesy, campy effect, and I'm tired of pretending that it's not in horrible taste. We don't have to ban it all together, but we can limit it to the more fringe parts of society, like strip clubs outside of town, rather than welcoming it into public streets, libraries, and everywhere else where we're forced to look at it without consent.
@magicalkittycat
I hate the way that "consent" language has infiltrated society at all levels. There's just a gradual erosion of people's understanding of private ownership, and public spaces. Whether it's oil pipelines, AI data centers or a new Buc-ees, everyone seems to think they should have a say in how private corporations use their own private property.
Black face is legal, and "girl face" is legal. If a privately owned business open to the public wants to put on a minstrel show or a drag show they are legally allowed to do that everywhere in the United States. The public is also allowed to boycott such businesses, if they want to. Stop being lazy and leveraging the government to do your work for you. Vote with your wallet, and don't frequent businesses that do things you find distasteful. If a public library has a drag show, go to your town council meetings and get the libraries defunded or whatever. Don't just hope that we'll all ban a thing you happen to dislike.
And what if they don't want to? What if they don't want to bake the cake? This appeal to freedom of association only ever flows in one direction.
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Doesn’t zoning control where strip clubs can set up shop almost everywhere? What’s the reason that this same principle couldn’t be applied to drag shows?
Municipal govts. are allowed to ban strip clubs from certain zones because they have studies showing that strip clubs have undesirable "secondary effects" of increased crime. Quote from the latest (2002) case:
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But you see the Motte and Bailey here, right? We're not just talking about private businesses. If the drag queens would keep it there, there'd be no problem (and most of us wouldn't even know that it exists). But they want to move it into public spaces, where we wouldn't normally expect to encounter sexually explicit acts. If I were to walk into the public library or downtown main street naked, I'd get arrested for public indecency, but the drag queens seem to argue that this is some sort of human right, even though it seems very much like a fetish for them.
I can't exactly "boycott" every single public space, and even if I did, I might actually have an opinion on whether its good for them to be used in putting children into someone's fetish play. At some poine, it's simply easier to do a blanket ban rather than try to play small town politics over every single posible location. And yes, when we're talking about people trying to force their sexuality on the rest of us, I do think that usingi the language of consent is appropriate.
I think sex has always been the weakest link of free speech in Western societies. There was a long-standing fragile cope with the "know it when I see it" "rule" for porn, but the bottom line is that once sex starts becoming involved, even the most principled free-speech advocate runs out of tolerance for views that go against their preference. Being a drag queen is "speech" in the same sense that performance art is (it is meant to convey something), but it is speech that evokes the horror of the object of your sexual desire being replaced by a male caricature of it, so you label it "indecent" and invoke the right to not be exposed to it. What is the principled way to distinguish this from an argument that speech for any political system that relates to human sexuality at all is likewise "indecent" as it may invoke sexual horror in those who are repelled by some aspect of the system's programme? If you can be protected from disgust at drag queens, why can't a blue-hair campus activist be protected from disgust at Christians?
Free expression and the freedom from exposure can coexist: places advertising sex in abstract (like "NSFW") opaque to bystanders unless they consent.
In public spaces I think it should be the town that decides what's allowed. A problem with today's society is that large states and larger governments intervene in things that should be local: unless it's like child abuse or slavery, people can move (and I don't think drag shows fall into child abuse, although admittedly I've never seen one, I'm thinking more severe cases like physical assault, neglect, and deprivation).
I do think a "freedom of speech + freedom from exposure" set of norms is conceivable, but doing that in a principled manner, too, would require deep changes to how societies are organised. You do get at a key problem in suggesting that the town should decide (because you can't unify one individual's freedom from exposure with another's freedom of speech and his audience, if all three+ of them have to share a space), but (1) why is the town the natural unit and (2) would the results you get really be that much more satisfactory for anyone, if acceptable exposure were fully devolved to towns? You would get quite a lot of blue towns, in which drag queens and Democratic politics are considered decent but Christianity and Republican politics (all rape PTSD triggers!) are not, and red towns, with the converse; and many of them would have a pretty large captive minority of people with their speech much more constrained in practice than it is at the moment.
Towns decide public spaces because they own public spaces. Individuals decide their own spaces (house or apartment interior, car interior, and exteriors to limited extent), groups of towns or states decide buildings that serve multiple towns (e.g. waste treatment plant, nuclear power plant; car exteriors should also be state or nation mandated, because the vast majority will drive between towns, and many will drive between states).
You would have those towns, but many towns (including some cities) have roughly an even split, so I expect they’d be more reasonable. Also, I think the town shouldn’t dictate what people do within their own home or apartment room, although it would be hard to prevent them, it would be hard for them to enforce anything.
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That sounds pretty backwards relative to what happened. The blue-hair campus activist didn't use the taboos around sex to argue for political censorship, they spent the better half of the last century using the principle of free speech to take apart all taboos, including the ones around sex, and once that allowed them to get strong enough, they turned around to impose their own taboos on people they promised "liberation" to.
Even outside of that, they don't limit themselves to demands of being protected from views they find disgusting, they demand the right to impose their views on people who find them disgusting.
I never claimed that this is actually the argument that blue-hair campus activists used, historically, to argue for censorship; only that they could use that argument, and it's not clear how you would refuse it on principled ground while allowing the argument against drag queens. The Schelling fence around free speech can only be reliably drawn around all speech, including speech that is optimised to make you imagine sexual scenarios that you find highly uncomfortable.
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That's true. I can't really give you a logical argument for why it seems much worse to watch someone else's sex acts than to watch someone else's religious rituals. Nonetheless... it is, and I think the vast majority of people would agree with me on that. I suppose this is one of those "I know it when I see it" things, where the law runs into basic human nature in a less-than-perfectly-logical way.
For what it's worth, I wouldn't mind so much if they did it as peformance art in specially marked artistic venues. I have a very high tolerance for that sort of thing! My objection is more that they try to smuggle it in as innocuous behavior that should be accepted everywhere, which seems dishonest when it's obviously controversial.
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being naked in public is different than doing black face in public so that is its own motte and bailey. If your opinion is that "girl face"/drag in public is more like black face in public then if black face is legal it follows "girl face"/drag should also be legal. If your opinion is that "girl face"/drag is more like being naked in public then your opinion sounds about right to me.
I notice that "incredibly cheesy, campy effect" and "horrible taste" on one comment becomes "sexually explicit acts" and "fetish play" on the next. I'm sure there is some level of "girl face"/drag in public that you are ok with on a case-by-case basis. Personally I can tell you there have been plenty of incredibly cheesy, campy, and horrible taste outfits by clearly straight women that I kinda just huff my nose and ignore it, I certainly would not ignore sexually explicit acts and fetish play.
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I think it is legitimate for you to participate in things like local schoolboard elections, or local city council elections to get performances that use your tax dollars shut down. I don't think it is appropriate to restrict everyone's freedoms because you're unwilling to take the time to research your local schoolboard elections. (I'm a libertarian, and I would generally prefer for government spending and policy decisions to be as local as possible, largely to avoid the incentive to keep making a bigger and bigger administrative state that is impossible to dismantle.)
Are these events really happening at every public space? I've wandered through various commercial neighborhoods in my city, and I've never just randomly stumbled upon a drag show. I'm sure on any given weekend, I would find one if I was determined to, but randomly having them happen has never really been an issue.
Drag doesn't have to be sexual though. Shakespearean actors did drag, and it wasn't sexual. English Pantomime had drag, and it wasn't sexual.
While I don't necessarily endorse drag shows for elementary schoolers, I think that a more toned down drag performance could, in theory, be appropriate, if that is what parents and the local school board want to do with their local community resources. I think it would also be appropriate to give parents the opportunity to opt out, as is often done for things like sex ed, or occasionally for other controversial parts of a school curriculum.
So why is it legitimate to ask for action at the local/district level, but not at the state level? That seems fairly arbitary. In fact, in the US legal system, states have rather more power than local districts, so it makes a lot more sense to act at the state level. In more practical terms: Most of us don't have the time or ability to fight lawsuits, so the only way it gets done is to pool resources and fight it at the state level. This is one of many issues where I think libertarians are just kind of naiive to how the real world works.
No, of course not. In normal life it doesn't bother me that much either. But that cuts both ways... apparently this is such a minor issue that people can live without it. What's the harm if we just ban it? It seems like it would give a lot of people peace of mind, while only harming a very small minority. They could always move to California or New Hampshire if they really, really need to live as drag queens.
It doesn't have to be but... in modern practice, it almost always is. Nobody would really have an issue with shakespear festivals casting men in women's roles or whatever. But what the drag queens seem to really fight for is obviously a sex fetish for them, and I'm tired of having to look the other way and pretend like this is some high class theater thing. Really, it's fine, we can just ban this and it's not the road to slavery, it's just the road to a more civilized public life.
Because states have too many people. It’s easier to move towns than states because you can visit your old spaces faster, and there would be small groups that wouldn’t find refuge in any state, but may be large enough to take over a town.
Like @vorpa-glavo’s comment I support individualism when feasible, but individual homeowners aren’t rich enough for their own private park, library, etc. or soundproofing, road maintenance, etc. Towns are, so they shou
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You do realize that this exact same argument applies to this forum, right?
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I mean, I'm partial to something like Scott Alexander's Archipelago, where aside from some high level rules everyone has to follow, everyone is free to pursue their own version of happiness, preferably in community with other people.
State level bans are preferable to federal bans, but I would prefer many bans to be at the city or county level, if they're going to happen at all, for two reasons: 1) the population of the United States has become less mobile and doesn't move as often, which means that the ideal of Archipelago, where someone can move to a different "island" that better represents their values is becoming less of a reality, and 2) I just think cities are more natural community-like units for policy to be carried out in than states.
Sure, and I think most people are partial to something like that in principle. The problem is... externalities exist. None of us can practice our own perfect freedom without infringing on our neighbors, at least a little. We're not actually living in an archipelago, we're living in a town where we all choke on each other's cigarette smoke and get stuck behind each other in traffic. And that means, we have to hide our shame so we don't traumatize kids.
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