Toulouse. The controversy over the workshop with drag queens continues
Left-wing elected officials from the Toulouse city council disapprove of Mayor Jean-Luc Moudenc’s decision to reserve the reading workshop by drag queens for an adult audience.
A reading workshop for children by two drag-queens planned at the José Cabanis media library in Toulouse continue to cause a stir. The meeting has happened in the sights of a far-right groupFrench fury who launched a petition against his organization.
“Abject propaganda targeting a malleable public”, Reconquête en Haute-Garonne
In an open letter to the mayor of Toulouse, Jean-Luc Moudenc, the departmental delegate Reconquest! in Haute-Garonne Chantal Dounot was moved by the establishment ofan appointment “deemed as unacceptable by many Toulouse parents”.
She believes that “the queer movement promoted by the Mission Égalité Diversité (partner of the organization of the workshop, editor’s note) is a committed politician whose ideology is not unanimous among (our) fellow citizens. Even considering gender as a fashionable societal subject with the right to debate, it is unacceptable that it imposes itself on our children, in the middle of school holidays, in a municipal cultural space, open to all. According to her, the workshop is “abject propaganda targeting a malleable audience because it lacks the capacity for free will”.
The municipality plays the appeasement
The Toulouse municipality recognizes that “this choice of programming – which did not give rise to any visa or endorsement from elected officials – can destabilize part of the public”. In “a concern for appeasement”, the Town Hall of Toulouse has therefore decided to “reorient” the reading workshop by drag queens “to accommodate only an adult audience”. She specifies that “parents wishing to involve their children in this type of workshop could, of course, do so, but in a private setting”.
The left asks for the organization of the reading workshop for children in Toulouse
Another story is heard on the side of elected municipal officials on the left and environmentalists. They share “their firm opposition to Jean-Luc Moudenc’s decision to go in the direction of far-right groups aimed at censoring a reading event by drag queens of texts around benevolence and open-mindedness”.
They believe that the mayor of Toulouse “is once again on the wrong side of history”. (…) If Jean-Luc Moudenc tries to make believe that he has changed since the Manif pour tous in which he participated in 2012, he reveals by this act the support for intolerance, far from the humanist ideas of our city. He does not light the facade of the Capitol with the LGBTQI+ flag once a year to carry out a sufficiently inclusive policy. »