Thank goodness for Jennifer Krouse. While we thought we were only electing her to the Jefferson County Commission, she has grown into so much more. She has become the protector of our children at this critical time when we have so miserably failed in our own responsibilities. We must now recognize her with a new title – Leader of the Jefferson County Morality Squad.

Of course, I mainly write in praise of Leader Krouse for her role in the enactment by the County Commission of an ordinance prohibiting a parent (or anyone else) from taking a child to an “adult live performance,” which everyone knows means drag shows. Drag shows are where men dress up like women and make jokes about it.

I remember reading some Shakespeare plays as an assignment in high school. There were men dressing up like women and women dressing up like men. Oh, the inhumanity! This just shows what we get when we allow artists to run amok.

A friend showed me a letter she had written to the County Commission complaining that there had been no public hearing before the ordinance was enacted. She pointed out that Commissioner Stolipher advocated for holding a public hearing but was overruled.

The Leader responded to my friend’s letter by saying that “Only someone with an irredeemably damaged moral compass would be against protecting children from such material. Given that, there was no need to open this up to an extraordinary level of debate.”

Now that’s what I call enlightened leadership!

I looked up the ordinance and it uses an entire paragraph to define “adult live performance.” The definition was confusing and maybe that’s the point! If parents are unsure what it means, they won’t take the chance of being fined. They won’t dare take a 17-year-old child to entertainment where anything about sex could possibly be mentioned. That’s what we want, right?

I did understand that you can’t take kids to any show that is obscene and lacks serious literary and artistic value – and everyone knows what that means. Don’t they?

I must confess that I once went to a drag show in Palm Springs with some friends. The queens were flamboyant, but they didn’t take themselves seriously. They laughed and made fun of the audience. The whole thing was, well . . . very funny.

I know that this is totally disgusting and that I should be ashamed of myself. Because we know that there is only one way to think about gender and sexuality and you are showing us that way. We were meant to be very strict about these things, and our children should be stopped from thinking that they are humorous in any way.

So, Leader Krouse, the parents of Jefferson County will be forever grateful to you and the other members of the Morality Squad for passing an ordinance that fines us if we expose our children to moral corruption. We have so needed your firm hand on our shoulder. You have helped us identify that corruption even though, in our weakness, we could not see it on our own.

And blowing off a public hearing to discuss the ordinance spared us from unnecessary discussion and irrelevant points of view. Who knows what could have come from that?

But whatever else you and the Squad do, please protect our children from Shakespeare!