Christian advocacy group One Million Moms has launched a boycott of Whole Foods Market over the chain’s recent sponsorship of a “Drag Queen Story Hour” event in Atlanta.
In its campaign, introduced last week, One Million Moms – a division of American Family Association – said Amazon-owned Whole Foods was “a retailer that once promoted organics and clean food,” but now is “exploiting America’s children to be ‘groomed’ by drag queens.”
Whole Foods was a primary sponsor of the Drag Queen Story Hour in Atlanta, an event that had been endorsed by the city’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms. NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and NFL’s Atlanta Falcons also sponsored the event held in June at city hall.
In April, Bottoms tweeted an invitation to drag queen “Miss Terra Cotta Sugarbaker [aka Steven Igarashi-Ball] and all of our LGBT friends” to go to Atlanta for a Drag Queen Story Hour event. The invitation was extended after an Alpharetta library branch pulled its drag queen event.
Drag Queen Story Hour events are targeted to young children and parents continue to take them to the story hours despite significant controversy and concerns their true purpose is not entertainment, but the manipulation of young children into accepting gender ideology.
One drag queen made headlines last fall when he admitted the events are not just about “entertainment.”
Dylan Pontiff, a gay man who uses the name Santana Pilar Andrews when dressed in drag, helped organize a story hour for Louisiana preschoolers. He said the event’s purpose is “the grooming of the next generation.”
Pontiff told the Lafayette City-Parish Council, “I am not there to push any kind of agenda.”
He continued, however:
I’m here to let you know that this event is something that’s going to be very beautiful and for the children and the people that supported are going to realize that this is going to be the grooming of the next generation. We are trying to groom the next generation to not see the way that they just did.
In October, pro-family media LifeSiteNews archived photos of a laughing drag queen, Anthony Hudson, aka “Carla Rossi,” lying on the floor during a story hour event in Portland, Oregon, arms outstretched, as young children buried themselves in his body and fondled him.
Multnomah County Library, the library system serving Portland, quietly removed from Flickr the photos of the Drag Queen Story Hour that took place at St. John’s Library and were then circulated on Facebook, leading to a backlash.
The Blaze subsequently reported that Jeremy Graybill, Multnomah County Library’s marketing and online engagement director, said the Drag Queen Story Hour events “explore ideas of difference, diversity and inclusion through stories, music and costume.”
“The library serves a diverse population with a broad range of interests, preferences and needs,” Graybill explained. “We strive to reflect our communities’ needs in selecting programs, books and other materials.”
Drag queen Pontiff’s “grooming” message reverberated in March when Houston MassResistance exposed Alberto Garza, aka “Tatiana Mala-Nina,” who read to young children in Houston’s Freed-Montrose Public Library.
Garza had been convicted in 2008 for sexually assaulting an eight-year-old boy. The library had failed to perform a background check on Garza or any of the other drag queens appearing in its programs.
In July, drag queen “Cassie Nova,” aka James Gary Love, read the book, What Color is Your Underwear? to small children at a Dallas library.
Jo Guidice, Dallas library system director, said “her office received more than 700 calls, 250 emails and an uncounted number of complaints on social media” about the event.
Guidice added, however, that parents who disapproved of the event could take their children to any of 17 other reading programs within the library system occurring at the same time.
According to MassResistance, library staff set up an activity table with drag queen coloring pages so the children could color in the “queens.”
Liberty Counsel reported that a recent national conference of the American Library Association (ALA) offered librarians from across the United States strategies for arranging Drag Queen Story Hours and for bringing LGBT agenda materials into public libraries without parents’ knowledge.
Workshops at the conference, which was held in June and attended by more than 21,000 people, included titles such as:
A Child’s Room to Choose: Encouraging Gender Identity and Expression in School and Public Libraries; LGBTQ+ Creators and Characters in Kids, Tween, and Teen Comics; Reading the Rainbow: Teaching Kids about Pride and LGBTQ+ History; Are You Going to Tell My Parents?: The Minor’s Right to Privacy in the Library; and Telling Stories, Expanding Boundaries: Drag Queen Story Times in Libraries.
Other breakout sessions at the ALA conference included how to promote LGBT-themed children’s literature, including titles such as My Brother’s Husband, Lumberjanes, and Pregnant Butch.
In June, the Christian Post reported that a Seattle drag queen “Teen Pride” event for adolescents included a raffle for a “breast binder” – used by females to flatten the breasts in order to appear more masculine – and featured a drag queen who performed a strip tease for teens while another got on his knees and howled during the performance.
For its Whole Foods campaign, One Million Moms created a petition that has been supported by over 9,000 signers to date.
“I will not shop at Whole Foods Market as long as your company is supporting Drag Queen Story Hour,” the petition states. “I find it irresponsible that your company is exploiting America’s children to be ‘groomed’ by drag queens in hopes to indoctrinate children into transgenderism and homosexuality.”
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