Last week, Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) sent a letter to the Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany objecting to the Air Force Library’s plan to host a “Drag Queen Story Time” event for young children of service members this Thursday. “I urge you to immediately cancel this politically divisive event, and take appropriate disciplinary action against all involved in allowing this gross abuse of taxpayer funding to place children in a sexualized environment,” Rubio wrote, arguing that it was “completely insane for Ramstein AFB to use on-installation resources” for the initiative. “These inappropriate events are extremely divisive at home for good reason; in all cases, they place young children in close proximity with adults who are intentionally and explicitly sexualized.”
A day later, the Air Force canceled the event and deleted any mention of it from the Ramstein & Vogelweh Air Force Library’s Facebook page, where it had previously been advertised with flyers like the one below:
“An advertisement was posted to the base library social media page before the event had completed Ramstein’s established processes for special observance coordination and approval,” a public-affairs spokesperson for the 86th Airlift Wing told the Post Millennial. “The advertisement has been removed and the event will not take place.”
It wasn’t the first time that the base had hosted the event. As the Post Millennial reported, “the base, on which 54,000 American service members are stationed, accompanied by more than 5,400 US civilian employees, had held a Drag Story Hour in 2021.” Other bases, such as the Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, hosted similar events last year. In a statement, the Nellis base defended hosting a drag-queen show on the grounds that “ensuring our ranks reflect and are inclusive of the American people is essential to the morale, cohesion, and readiness of the military”:
At Nellis Air Force Base last week, pilots were gathered around a different kind of runway. https://t.co/kUUfeS8mE7
— Family Research Council (@FRCdc) June 23, 2021
But after Rubio called attention to the taxpayer-funded “Drag Queen Story Time” affair in Germany, officials were quick to relent. It’s a small victory, in the grand scheme of things, but it’s yet another powerful testament to how conservatives can win on culture-war issues if they’re courageous enough to engage. Republicans should seek to emulate successes like these.