Vice President Kamala Harris in a get-out-the-vote appearance on RuPaul’s Drag Race Photo: RuPaul’s Drag Race
The anti-LGBTQ hate group the Family Research Council (FRC) is criticizing a get-out-the-vote (GOTV) appearance that Vice President Kamala Harris recently made on the season finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 9.
The one-minute GOTV appeal by Harris — who was accompanied by comedian Leslie Jones, Lance Bass, actor Cheyanne Jackson and two regularly visiting Drag Race collaborators — was shot in the show’s “werk room” two weeks before the Democratic nominee announced her campaign for president.
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“Late last week, Harris appeared on ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ to stump for the crossdresser vote,” the FRC said through their in-house propaganda organ The Washington Stand.
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It was “one of her first campaign appearances on a TV show glamorizing gender confusion,” FRC added, misstating Harris’s campaign timeline, since her presidential campaign hadn’t officially started yet.
The FRC is an evangelical lobbying group and far-right-funded think tank that has a long history of anti-LGBTQ+ activism while promoting what it calls “family values.”
The Washington Stand‘s screed against Harris’s appearance on the show invoked COVID-19 mask mandates, so-called “minor-attracted persons,” Ronald Reagan’s dog whistling “state’s rights” appearance at a Mississippi state fair in 1980, and a lame callback to former White House Communications Director Pat Buchannan’s greatest “cross-dressing” hits.
The screed also took issue with Harris’s assertion on Drag Race that “rights and freedoms are under attack” came “without proof.”
“When Harris’s supporters say, ‘Slay, Queen!’ they mean the gender binary and the unborn,” the council blurted in a juvenile dead baby joke. “What ‘rights and freedoms’ does she claim are under attack, and from whom?” the Stand article asked, ignoring over 600 pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation offered by Republicans in 43 state legislatures in 2024 alone.
“As the more committed ideologue of the Biden-Harris administration, she has guided the administration’s full-scale, ‘whole-of-government’ embrace of LGBT extremism since 2021,” the publication’s rant continued. “Their administration has placed luggage-stealing trans-identifying people in sensitive government positions. It has boasted of rewriting Title IX to allow males inside female locker rooms, showers, and college dorm rooms. And it has threatened to withhold school lunch money from poor children if their districts refuse to comply.”
While Harris had nothing to do with the strange case of Sam Brinton — the nonbinary LGBTQ+ activist and Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy who was charged with felony theft for snatching luggage at the Minneapolis Airport — she has embraced changes to Title IX to include discrimination protections based on sex and gender identity.
The FRC’s publication claimed that her Drag Race appearance “signals her priorities and the way she will govern if elected,” implying that RuPaul’s queen-making will extend all the way to the White House. “The media usually agree,” the FRC added, amplifying the right-wing claim that the so-called lamestream media is in the pockets of pro-abortion Democrats.
As evidence, the screed referenced a 1980 appearance at a Mississippi state fair by Ronald Reagan, who was then the new Republican presidential nominee. At the fair, Reagan talked about “state’s rights.” Because New York Times columnist Bob Herbert knew this was a dog-whistle appeal to racists — “everyone knew,” wrote Herbert — the FRC’s publication implied hat Harris’s comments on Drag Race indicate that she’ll support LGBTQ+ rights in her administration.
Thanks for stating the obvious, FRC.
“If you want to know who Kamala Harris will serve, just look at her campaign stops,” the FRC publication concluded, citing Harris’s appearances with the American Federation of Teachers union and on Drag Race. The FRC notably omitted her two other recent speeches to two major Black sororities as well as her a jubilant Black-majority rally for 10,000 supporters in Atlanta.
“The rest is just political cross-dressing,” the publication added.
