Many states are going to be passing laws banning drag queens and they will have a hard time doing it because drag queens are protected by the First Amendment.
‘Unconstitutional’ anti-drag bills would restrict musicals, panto and even Shakespeare
Republican Arizona lawmakers have proposed three anti-drag bills that would define all gender non-conforming performances as “adult content” – including musicals.
Pink News
By Amelia Hansford
January 9, 2023
The three Senate bills were all introduced by Republican senator John Kavanagh after being prefiled on Friday (6 January).Each relates specifically to drag performances and attempts to restrict public family-friendly drag shows in some capacity.
One of the bills, SB1026, would ban performances in which an individual or group “dress in clothing and makeup opposite of the performer’s or group of performers’ gender at birth” in a show for under-18s.
If passed, this would essentially mean that most pantomime performances, musicals, and even much of Shakespeare’s work would be deemed “adult-only” content.
The other two bills would ban drag performances on public property and third bill defines what is a drag performance, “adult content” with zoning ordinances that would force establishments that host drag shows to apply for “adult-oriented business manager permits”.
Not being a lawyer this is just my opinion that the state will have to show that “crossdressing” is obscene.
LGBTQ+ activists unanimously slammed the three bills as “insane” and “unconstitutional” for essentially imposing strict gendered roles on clothing without pretence as to what those would be.
“How do we even define ‘opposite gender clothes’ at this point? What constitutes exaggerated gender?” one user wrote. “How the heck would you be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that either of these things has happened?”
That is the scary part these laws could make being trans illegal, this harkens back to the 1950s when you could get arrested for wearing clothing of the opposite gender, the History Channel wrote,
“I have been arrested in New York more times than I have fingers and toes,” she told an interviewer from the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project in 1983, “for wearing pants and a shirt.” At that time, she says, “you had to have three pieces of female attire” in order to avoid being arrested for cross-dressing.
In LGBTQ circles around the country, this was known as the three-article rule—or the three-piece law. It was referenced everywhere—including in reports about arrests in Greenwich Village in the weeks and months leading up to the 1969 Stonewall Riots.
[…]
Laws criminalizing cross-dressing spread like wildfire around the United States in the mid-19th century. New York’s, dating back to 1845, was one of the oldest. It declared it a crime to have your “face painted, discolored, covered, or concealed, or [be] otherwise disguised… [while] in a road or public highway.”
Are we returning to the 50s?
The Supreme Court has ruled many times that nudity can be regulated but with limits…
In a 5-4 decision announced by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the Supreme Court ruled in Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc., 501 U.S. 560 (1991), that the state of Indiana could regulate totally nude dancing without violating the First Amendment, even though such performance dancing constituted expressive conduct.
The case came before the Court on writ of certiorari after two entertainment establishments and the dancers they employed sought an injunction to stop enforcement of an Indiana public indecency statute that made nudity in a public place a misdemeanor. The statute defined "nudity" in a way that required female dancers to wear G-strings and pasties.
In 1972 in the case of California v. LaRue the court ruled…
The Court first hinted that nude dancing might be entitled to First Amendment protection in California v. LaRue (1972). In this case, the Court upheld the power of state government officials to regulate the sale of alcoholic beverages at bars offering nude dancing, but Justice William H. Rehnquist’s opinion for the Court observed that “at least some of the performances to which these regulations address themselves are within the limits of the constitutional protection of freedom of expression.”
Three years later, in Doran v. Salem Inn (1975), the Court again alluded to constitutional protection for nude dancing. Rehnquist wrote, “Although the customary ‘barroom’ type of nude dancing may involve only the barest minimum of protected expression, ... this form of entertainment might be entitled to First and Fourteenth Amendment protection under some circumstances.”
In Schad v. Mount Ephraim (1981), the Court struck down a local ordinance banning all live entertainment in a New Jersey borough. The operators of an adult bookstore that offered nude dancers in booths for patron viewing successfully challenged the ordinance. Justice Byron R. White wrote for the Court that “nude dancing is not without its First Amendment protections from official regulation.”
The states will have hard time banning us but with this Supreme Court it is a crap shoot, because they haven't been following court precedent and it is a Christian court so how they will rule is anyone's guess.
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