In a place called Sanityville it seems strange to see such an insane post title. Here’s a work-safe link to the story of the 10 year old drag queen, “Queen Lactatia,” who posed with the nearly nude winner of a drag contest.
It’s old news by now, but in case you hadn’t heard about it, here’s the story about the 11 year old drag queen who danced at a New York bar getting dollar bills thrown at him.
Despite all this you might think that it’s a degeneracy limited to the patrons of gay bars. But you might reconsider that after remembering his iconic photo:
A link to their website: Drag Queen Story Hour. Coming to a library near you!
The sane response
Eludes me. To what extent are men responsible for their communities, for what happens in their public libraries? It seems to me that there is only as much responsibility as there is authority, which is hardly any at all. For instance, it would be illegal to go into the library, shoo the kids away, and beat the perpetrators. The furthest extent of legal action would be to file a complaint and talk to your representative. And this is good; I don’t think any sane government has handed authority and responsibility directly to the citizen. However, this seems to be the great shortcoming of democracy. If someone is responsible, it is very ambiguous who that person is. In a monarchy, or any clear top down hierarchy, the person responsible and with authority over that town has a directive to keep degenerates away from the children. If he doesn’t, he failed. Who failed here? All of us collectively voting?
The church
Is the only institution that is actually capable of dealing with this as far as I can tell. The state is throttled by democracy and over-distributed authority, but the church is not. But that too seems incomplete, as the church doesn’t have any authority over what happens in the public library, except insofar as the operators of that library are its members. The church can condemn, imprecate, shame, and convert. Had it been doing this all along, would we be where we currently are? Or would it simply have slowed it by 20 years?
The state
It’s things like these that make me understand the pull of authoritarians like Hitler, Assad, Deuterte, Moussolini, and many others who took a problem by the political horns and solved it. In a sense these people are simply monarchs with tanks. Many evangelicals of course repudiate those regimes as ultimately more at odds with the kingdom of God than the degeneracy that is their alternative; and I grant automatically that they are not Christian rulers, or Christians themselves. But I don’t see in the Bible condemnation of heathen kings for being kings rather than being oligarchies or democracies. The criticism of them is what they do with their kingship. And at the end of the day every king who does not submit his life to Christ will be thrown in the lake of fire. But in the meantime it seems to me that men like these are useful political instruments in God’s hands, and beneficial to their countries. Hitler ended the Weimar Republic, Assad has been keeping Christians alive and allowing their message to spread for decades while keeping peace in an unstable place, Deuterte is cleaning his country of the drug trade that had it enslaved, and the infrastructure that Moussolini built is used to this day (not to mention the Vatican).
On the flip side, there are evil things that these men did as well. But that does not necessarily condemn that form of government, it may only mean that a better hand should lead it.
In essence, these men were in one way or another the sword of God, and visited his righteous anger to different groups of people. I wonder if democracy is more like a plastic lightsaber.