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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.
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?
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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