TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — A “Drag Queen Story Time” for young children of servicemembers was called off after a letter from Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) demanded the military branch cancel its “sexually charged” event.
The story time was scheduled to take place at an Air Force library at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.
In a letter to U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, Rubio said, “the last thing parents serving their nation overseas should be worried about… is whether their children are being exposed to sexually charged content simply because they visited their local library.”
In the letter, Rubio expressed the importance of U.S. military installations such as commissaries, pharmacies, schools, and libraries — especially outside the continental United States — but criticized Ramstein AFB for holding rituals like “Drag Queen Story Time.”
“I urge you to immediately cancel this politically divisive event, and take appropriate disciplinary action against all involved in allowing this gross abuse of taxpayer funding to place children in a sexualized environment,” Rubio wrote.
The Senator also called for disciplinary actions to be taken against the staff responsible for planning the event and demanded the Air Force respond to questions about whether other installations, both at home and around the world, have done similar events.
“As I hope you can agree, decisions over children and their bodies should be left to moms and dads serving our nation, not mediated through publicly funded propaganda on U.S. Air Force bases,” the letter added.
Following receipt of Rubio’s letter, the Air Force canceled the event.
According to Rubio’s letter, a flyer for a similar event held last year “highlighted the apparent inclusion of a controversial book, ‘The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish.'”
Rubio claimed the book’s author wrote it so children could “experience the magic of drag and to get a little practice shaking their hips or shimmying their shoulders to know how [they] can feel fabulous inside of [their] own bodies.”
The event was evidently hosted for children last June, the letter said.
