When I wrote a detailed analysis of “Drag Queen Storytime,” a program featuring drag queens reading to children that is popping up all over the continent, the Huffington Post mocked the idea that a rational person could have legitimate concerns. Another publication referred to me as “furious,” even though the column was factual rather than fire-breathing. But I am interested in what defenders of this program have to say to the news that the Houston Public Library has just been forced to publicly apologize and then ban a drag queen they had invited to read to children for Drag Queen Storytime when it was revealed that he had been previously charged for sexually assaulting a child.
Albert Alfonso Garza, a 32-year-old man who was last seen reading to children at the Montrose Library in September of 2018, goes by the drag queen name Tatiana Mala-Niña. The library did not do a background check on Garza or on any of the other cross-dressers it invited in to interact with other people’s children. I’d be willing to wager that the other libraries sponsoring this program have also failed to do background checks, as well. It was an activist group, MassResistance, that did the research on its own — and that is when it was discovered that Garza was convicted of sexually assaulting an 8-year-old boy in 2008.
Any parent who’d even bring their child to a sick spectacle like that is already guilty of child abuse.