Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is considering using child protective services to investigate parents who bring their children to see drag performances.
During a Wednesday press conference, DeSantis said he’d consider investigating parents, just as Florida Rep. Anthony Sabatini (R) proposed, to “terminate the parental rights” of an adult and hit them with a felony charge if they bring their children to watch drag shows.
The remarks from the governor who signed the controversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill into law followed a video posted to Twitter showing children attending a drag show in Texas, NBC News reported.
“We have child protective statutes on the books,” DeSantis said.
“We have laws against child endangerment. It used to be kids would be off-limits. Used to be everybody agreed with that. Now it just seems like there’s a concerted effort to be exposing kids more and more to things that are not age appropriate,” he added.
DeSantis added that a video from the show in Dallas was “totally inappropriate” and “not something children should be exposed to.”
Other Republicans and conservatives followed suit in calls to bar children from drag performances, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Drag shows and culture have been celebrated forms of expression in the LGBTQ community over the years.
Drag has also been popular on television in the form of shows such as “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” a program that won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Competition Program four straight times from 2018 to 2021.
Drag show performers have had a history of having “to contend with a legal system that punished non-normative gender expression,” according to an article on the art form by MasterClass.
This includes a number of cross-dressing laws passed between the 19th and 20th centuries, the site added. The LGBTQ community was also targeted by police with the technically nonexistent “three-article rule,” many of which began between the 1940s and 1960s.