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ST. PAUL, Minnesota, March 13, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — Republican members of the Minnesota House of Representatives have introduced a bill that would cut state funding for libraries hosting drag queen story hours.

The bill was first introduced on March 9 and has already been referred to the Education Finance Division.

According to the bill, officially known as HF 4323, “a public library that hosts a drag queen story hour event shall have regional library system support aid from the Department of Education reduced by 100 percent,” starting next year.

Consequently, a public library hosting a drag queen story hour, while being part of a regional public library system, “is ineligible for regional library basic system support aid from the Department of Education.” The money would have to be “reapportioned equally among the other public libraries in the participating regional public library system.”

In other words, the Northwest Regional Library system, which is one of the 12 regional library systems in Minnesota, would still receive the same amount of money from the state government, even if one of its nine locations hosted a drag queen story hour. However, only eight of the nine libraries in the system would then receive a (bigger) portion of that same amount of money. The library hosting the drag queen story hour would not be allowed to receive funding from Minnesota’s Department of Education.

HF 4323 defines “drag queen story hour” or “drag queen story time” as an event for children “in which a drag queen reads stories or books to children or engages in other learning or educational activities with children in a library setting.”

State representative Eric Lucero wrote on Facebook that he and his four colleagues who had introduced the bill “immediately began receiving hate email which continued throughout the evening and all night long.”

“I woke up this morning to an email Inbox full of hate email from those who insist taxpayer dollars from the state level be allowed to continue funding ‘drag queen story hour events’ hosted at the local level,” Lucero continued.

In October 2019, one Minnesota library made national headlines for hosting a drag queen story hour, as a drag queen briefly exposed his crotch in front of young children.

“Earlier this month, the group Child Protection League posted a photo from the event that shows drag queen ‘Sasha Sota’ at Ridgedale Library in Minnetonka,” LifeSiteNews reported at the time.

“Sota is sitting in a chair at the front of the room, spreading his legs as he reaches down to grab a book, revealing a view of his crotch in tight, flesh-colored leggings at the eye level of children in the audience.”

Lawmakers in other states have also started to push back against the promotion of gender ideology through drag queen story hours in public libraries.

In Missouri, House Bill 2044 would require any library that receives taxpayer dollars to create a review board composed of five parents elected from the community. That board would have “final authority over the permissibility of sexual material,” LifeSiteNews reported.

The bill, also known as the “Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act,” is currently not on the House calendar.

Last October, LifeSiteNews launched a petition telling Wanda Kay Brown, president of the American Library Association, to stop her organization’s efforts “to pervert the children of small-town America.”

The petition can still be signed. So far, almost 60,000 people have done so.