Striking a blow for sanity in the most unexpected setting — a university campus — West Texas A&M President Walter Wendler declared his school will not host a drag spectacle on campus.
Wendler responded to the announcement of a planned event featuring men pretending to be women. The Fool’s Drag Race called for students “interested in performing in a drag show” to contact Firstgen and said the performance was “coming soon.”
Wendler was having none of this. He wrote that “West Texas A&M University will not host a drag show on campus.” He asked that interested parties donate to the charity that the drag queen event was going to support, The Trevor Project.
This is a nonprofit benefiting suicide prevention in the LGBT community, something Wendler described as a “noble cause.”
THANK YOU to President Walter Wendler for his leadership and for not allowing drag shows to DISGRACE the campus of West Texas A&M University. These lewd “performances” are divisive & degrading. They DO NOT belong on campus!! https://t.co/PUhFr56a7e
— Ronny Jackson (@RonnyJacksonTX) March 21, 2023
Noble is not a good description of the administrator’s view of the planned drag show. As he said, it is “a performance exaggerating aspects of womanhood (femininity, gender), [and] drag shows stereotype women in cartoon-like extremes for the amusement of others.”
Wendler added that the spectacles “discriminate against womanhood” and that “such representation is wrong.” He asked if a drag show will preserve “a single thread of human dignity?”
The president went further, proclaiming that he will not support “blackface” performances on campus. Wendler added that the school should not “contribute to women’s suffering via a slapstick sideshow that erodes the worth of women.”
Needless to say, the leftist outrage machine kicked into high gear.
A petition circulated on campus for the controversial event to take place despite Wendler’s announcement. It called his reference to blackface “a gross and abhorrent comparison of two completely different topics.”
The petition also categorized drag as “a culture and form of performance art.”
Students planned daily protests all week in support of “transgender rights.”
Of all the settings for common sense and decency to reemerge, a college campus may have been the last one expected. Wendler showed tremendous courage to express such an unpopular position — at least in that setting — and the blowback will undoubtedly get worse.
