Will drag queen story time be banned in South Dakota libraries and schools?

Published: Jan. 30, 2020 at 4:13 PM CST
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Just so you know, drag queen story time at the public library is a no-go, according to a South Dakota state representative.

Rep. Tony Randolph (R-District 35) introduced a bill to block the state from “endorsing or enforcing certain policies regarding domestic relations,” including drag queen story time at public libraries and schools.

There are nearly a dozen prohibitions in

. If approved, the state would not be able to enforce, endorse, or favor policies that:

• Permit any form of marriage that does not involve a man and a woman;

• Appropriate benefits to persons who enter a marriage other than a marriage involving a man and a woman;

• Permit counties to issue marriage licenses to persons other than for a marriage involving a man and a woman;

• Treat sexual orientation as a suspect class or as a basis of prohibited discrimination;

• Recognize a person's belief that that person was born a gender that does not accord with the biological sex of the person as determined by that person's anatomy at birth;

• Appropriate tax dollars to pay for sex change operations;

• Ban conversion therapy. Under this subdivision, conversion therapy, means a therapeutic practice in which a licensed medical professional, acting under authorized consent, assists a client in the goal or realigning the client's sexual preference to prefer members of the opposite sex who have corresponding reproductive anatomy;

• Permit public libraries or public schools in the state to partner with nonsecular organizations to promote, host, sponsor, favor, or endorse drag queen storytime;

• Mandate pronoun changes;

• Condone or affirm homosexual, transgender, zoophilia, objectophilia, polygamy, or sexual orientation doctrines; and

• Permit a person to change the sex on a birth certificate to a sex that does not accord with that person's anatomy at birth.

However, people would still have a right to practice

.

The bill was introduced Thursday but has not been assigned to a committee.

Missouri's state Legislature also has a bill that would ban "age-inappropriate" drag queen story time.