A little over a week ago, seven people were killed during a shooting spree in Midland-Odessa, Texas. It was August’s third high-profile mass shooting—following attacks that killed 31 in Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas earlier in the month—and the fifth shooting this year to have killed at least a half dozen people. At an Odessa press conference last Sunday, it was noted by an FBI agent that there is an active shooting episode every two weeks in America, one of the striking statistics that have convinced many on the left that these increasingly common events—beyond reflecting the failures of our policymakers and political system to address gun violence with meaningful legislation—are evidence of a national psyche gone horribly wrong. It is a sick country that prizes its gun culture over public order, the freedom of a minority of Americans over the safety of all.

This includes our children, who have proven to be particularly vulnerable targets of mass gun violence. As of 2015, 96 percent of American schools now undergo active shooter drills. Last week a school district in Michigan unveiled plans for a new high school building with features designed to thwart gunmen including curved hallways and impact-resistant windows. Against solutions in this vein, a growing chorus of progressives is insisting that the time has come to take on the issue of gun violence more aggressively than ever before—to, through mandatory buybacks or gun bans—fundamentally rethink a certain sacred freedom for the common good.

Take full measure of liberal alarm and consternation over gun violence and its impact on our youngest and you might come to understand the terror inspired within a particular corner of the conservative world this year by Drag Queen Story Hours—library events held around the country in which drag queens read books, sing songs, and make crafts with children. “Through a fun and fabulous literary experience,” a website for the events reads, “DQSH celebrates learning and play, encouraging kids to celebrate gender diversity and all kinds of difference, while building confidence in expressing themselves.”



Not long ago, a project like this wouldn’t have rated more than a few fiery missives from the likes of the Family Research Council as an evangelical outrage of the month. A meandering denouncement, perhaps, from Pat Robertson on the 700 Club. But for the past several months, Drag Queen Story Hour has ripped apart the conservative intelligentsia like no subject since the nomination and election of Donald Trump. Long jeremiads and emotional rebuttals have been penned. Friendships have been strained. Alliances have been broken. All in the course of debating a question that may alter the trajectory of the American conservative movement—whether events like Drag Queen Story Hour should be tolerated by conservatives as the byproducts of a free and pluralistic society or whether conservatives should see in the construction of glitter wands and paper bag puppets a societal sickness grave enough to warrant the abandonment of classical liberalism.



It began, naturally, with a tweet. Scrolling through Facebook in May, Sohrab Ahmari, op-ed editor of the New York Post and a resident of New York City, came across an advertisement for a Drag Queen Story Hour event in Sacramento, California. He shared the post with his followers. “This is demonic,” he wrote. “To hell with liberal order. Sometimes reactionary politics are the only salutary path.” He went on to mention a defender of an alternative path by name. “There’s no polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war. The only way is through.”

