Drag Parody Of Last Supper Scene Will Hurt Gay Acceptance

The Olympics is an opportunity for host nations to celebrate their cultural contributions to the world. Apparently, the French are most proud of mocking Christians under the shadow of Notre Dame.

I’m not straight and I’m not baptized, but you don’t have to be either to be repelled by the openly naked ugliness on display at the Paris Olympics Friday night.

What was France trying to say of itself with a drag-themed parody to mock one of the holiest scenes in Christianity? Was this an image of France as an oasis of global inclusion? Or was it a neopaganistic expression of 21st-century transformation against the background of the world-famous 14th-century cathedral? Recent elections largely reflected a French population frustrated by mass migration, and they certainly still don’t love “body positivity,” so it is probably more so the latter.

The French also have a recent history of persecuting Christians, so don’t expect those who were mocked on Friday night to be all that included when these people take over. And let’s not pretend the performance, which featured a child, was an exercise in honoring the biblical supper scene because everybody knows Christians see drag as a manifestation of some underlying evil.

The gay movement took decades to convince its Christian neighbors that gays were normal. However, mocking one’s religious neighbors with an outright blasphemous display of fetishism to validate fringe sexual desires is anything but normal. It’s one thing to put a drag queen on a platform, and it’s another to weaponize an art perceived by Christians as demonic to demand their approval.

What activists often forget is that, much like politics, culture is a pendulum, and how far it swings in one direction will determine how far it swings in the other. Republicans only removed an explicit endorsement for heterosexual marriage this year, but those changes aren’t permanent, and recent polling suggests the beginning of a recoil.

The backlash against transgenderism already started. Last year, several surveys revealed steep declines in support for transgenderism, specifically related to biological men competing in women’s sports. The sliding approval numbers in support for homosexuality have just begun after the trans movement attached itself to the gay movement in an effort to gain public acceptance. New data from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) showed in March that support for gay marriage fell between 2022 and 2023 for the first time in nearly a decade. Recent Gallup surveys have corroborated the findings of support for same-sex marriage in decline, with 69 percent of Americans favoring “marriages between homosexuals” in May compared to 71 percent who said the same in 2022 and 2023.

Sexuality is not very interesting, and homosexuality became accepted and normalized when it stopped being interesting. Gay people stopped shocking us on films and television shows such as “Will & Grace” because most of our neighbors came to know a gay person, or a few. Does that mean we should start putting transvestite drag performers on family broadcasts to mock the Christians? That’s not normal behavior, so no one else wants to normalize that.

Jillian Michaels is a lesbian mom who recently fled California in part over the state’s cascade of legislation promoting child gender transitions even without parental notice.

“I grew up here. I’m a woman. I’m a gay woman. My mom’s a Jew. My dad’s an Arab. I have a black kid. And believe it or not, my son is half Latin, even though he doesn’t look like it,” Michaels explained on a recent podcast. “I hold a million cards in your game of woke victimology poker. And when I leave California, maybe you’ve lost your f—ing mind.”

Michaels summarized the risks of such blatant blasphemy on display at the Olympics with a post on X Saturday.

“Dear fellow gays… We demand tolerance and respect but then make a mockery of something sacred for over 2 billion Christians,” she wrote. “This type of hypocrisy and lack of understanding is a bad look. We get outraged when the extreme right bashes us, but then we do this shit. What kind of reaction do you think they will have towards the LGBTQ+ community after this[?] This is NOT how we break down barriers[;] it’s how you build them.”

Is drag demonic? I don’t think so. Is it sexual? Inherently, so let’s stop pretending it’s appropriate for children out of some need to cope with a narcissistic insecurity, lest we get carried away with convincing anxious anorexic teens that they really have gender dysphoria. Pretending otherwise will only drag down gay acceptance.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at [email protected]. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.