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