As “Drag Queen Story Hour” events sweep the nation, two ministers are exhorting fellow Christian men to bring “Pastor Story Hour” to their local public libraries.
The promotion of the LGBTQ movement among children, often through graphic strip teases and sexually explicit curricula in government schools, has recently been the center of political and social controversy. Dale Partridge of Prescott, Arizona, and Michael Foster of Batavia, Ohio, invited members of their communities to discover biblical teachings about God’s design for gender and encouraged other believers to do the same.
“Why are drag queens seemingly more interested in influencing the children in their community than pastors? Why are the lost more committed to the systematic and cultural evangelization of the public than American Christians are to evangelizing the gospel?” Partridge, who leads the digital ministry Relearn.org, commented in an interview with The Daily Wire. “These are hard questions the church needs to face. Christians need to see that Christianity is a totalizing faith, which means Christ should not be reserved only for church life, but should saturate and permeate our entire lives.”
Partridge said that between 15 and 20 children, as well as a handful of mothers and fathers, attended his Pastor Story Hour event at the Cottonwood Public Library in Arizona. He read from “Jesus and My Gender,” a children’s book he authored to teach a positive view of biblical boyhood and girlhood to young readers. According to Partridge, staff at the library asked him to change the event’s name from “Pastor Story Time for Kids” to “Family Bible Story Hour” and placed the event in the adult section rather than the children’s wing.
“Historically, Christian fathers took up the mantle of child discipleship,” Partridge added. “Fathers and mothers are to raise their children to understand what the Bible says about God, man, Christ, and the church. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Christian men have abdicated this role, leaving children vulnerable to the influence and lies of the culture. Namely, fathers don’t realize that if they don’t teach their children who they are, the world will.”
Partridge noted that viral speeches rebuking ideologically driven school boards are usually delivered by mothers. One notable exception is a successful campaign predominantly led by Muslim fathers to remove pornographic books from public school libraries in Michigan.
Foster, the senior pastor of East River Church, hosted an event at Clermont County Library with roughly 35 children in attendance, and said during an interview with The Daily Wire that the librarians were hospitable. “We are a fatherless nation and nature abhors a vacuum. Someone is going to fill that space in our nation,” he remarked. “I can let it be some disturbed men in lingerie or it can be a pastor like me. So I stepped up. Men, especially pastors, are called to be community leaders. Talk is cheap. I got a room, set a date, and made a Facebook event. It was easy.”
Observing that “Satan’s plan is for men to be boys, women to be men, and children to be unwanted,” Partridge said that LGBTQ activists may know “the value of catechism” even more than Christians. “They understand that children are malleable and impressionable, and instead of upholding and nurturing the historic, logical, biological, and scientific view of sexuality and gender, they exploit these children’s innocence to support their crooked political aspirations.”
Drag queen events targeted at children have more recently migrated from public libraries to gay bars in a number of viral instances. Lawmakers in Tennessee are currently advancing a bill that would prohibit “adult cabaret performers” from holding shows which could be seen by minors.