Rich week. A devastating ice storm, questioned Hydro, badly pruned trees, the hassle caused by all electricity, the urban disaster victims almost won the stock market.
We have also seen the reappearance of reasonable accommodation and the blind spot of Bill 21. Not ostentatious religious signs, but physical places devoted to prayer. This is the rising topic among commentators. But despite all this competition, the palm of the interest returns to the “business” of the drag queens, probably because it concentrates a part of the atmosphere of the time.
Let’s remember the facts. Barbada, the most educational of drags, had to go, as he does regularly, to read stories to children in the town of Sainte-Catherine. A demonstration of parents, but not only, old notorious antivax recycled in antidrags, awaited it. It was, so to speak, the wig that set fire to the dressing room. For critics of Barbada and its sisters, the drags are on a mission to corrupt young minds. They would show, from an early age, that it is possible not to be assigned to one’s gender, to self-determine. A playful form of gender theory activism. Incidentally, demonstrators also put forward the arguments of child Satanism!
For some, drag queens lead the way in Quebec. All TV shows invite them, the flamboyant Rita Baga is a full-time character on our screens, the endearing Mona from Grenoble recently triumphed at Big Brother Celebrities. For what ?
They are for some harmless and entertaining. For others, the Trojan horse adorned with brutal feminine stereotypes. One thing is certain, they are the object of an ideological trench warfare.
Through their characters, the whole question of gender theory, of the construction of identities is highlighted, we touch on acute LGBTQ struggles. The politician threw himself into the Barbados fray, unanimously voting for a motion deploring “hateful and discriminatory remarks towards people from the LGBTQiS2+ community in the public sphere”.
But all was not said. The war culminated on Friday in The duty. For those obsessed with the thawing freezer and the major blackout, in short, the real world of real business, like, let’s recap. Two chroniclers with ideological antipodes, in the same pages, dealt with the affair. Christian Rioux observed that drag queens are transformed into sad commissioners of the good gendered word, and that the cultural press (does) us morals. While for Aurélie Lanctôt, the anti-queer panic is presented in Puritan clothes.
On the right and on the left, we treat each other as puritans. So here we are at degree zero of insult: PURITAN.
Puritan designates one who displays scrupulous moral purity, a rigorous respect for principles. Synonyms: austere, modest, rigorous, moralist. Two puritanisms therefore exist, that of the stuck in the ass and that of the stuck in the mind. The anti-debauchery priests and the moralists of thought.
We suspected it well: we live in a puritan era, despite the sleazy appearances and the great unpacking of hypersexualization. We have seen them flourish, these trauma warnings to sensitive audiences, before books, films, series. We see them, these preaching words in humor, in art…
Allegations of puritanism are, for both sides, an insult, of course. But for now, it’s almost a contest to see who will be the purest, most morally correct, post-modern model of virtue, least corrupted by “dirty” thinking. We must line up on the side of the good. Because the opposite of moral purity is closed-mindedness, and not impurity, dissidence, audacity, which can be criticized, but which must exist. The Puritan moral order is advancing in all areas, and on all sides of the political spectrum. Puritanism has become a political option, where the extreme left and right come together. He binds us.
Fortunately, and perhaps because of the ambient rigorism, more people don’t let loose without discernment or sensitivity to the Other. Probably also because we are collectively better educated, better educated. The peaceful and welcoming camp of “live and let live”, open and curious, for whom a drag queen is a sympathetic figure of diversity, dominates. For the majority, the drags are neither the spokespersons of the “new diverse religion”, nor the “facilitators of pedo-satanicism”!
Will outrageous puritanism get the better of the common sense of the majority? Let’s calm down, and remember that this debate is raging in Quebec, kingdom of consensus, of good understanding, where everyone likes kindness and soft clothes, even drag queens, in the comfort of their homes! Our ideological hoodie is perhaps the best bulwark against the rising stiffness of Puritanism…