TORONTO (LifeSiteNews) – A children’s festival taking place this weekend in Toronto is slated to feature drag queens reading to children and a “queer songbook orchestra” concert for kids.
Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre is hosting a “multidisciplinary festival for children” this weekend called “JUNIOR,” funded in part by taxpayer dollars through the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund. The festival, which is marketed to kids “ages 4–14,” features a “Storytime” event in which men dressed in drag read to children and a “queer” concert that promotes “the 2SLGBTQ+ community.”
According to a description of “Storytime,” “Drag performers Fay Slift and Fluffy Soufflé” will read “culturally diverse books” and play music while “encouraging everyone to see our differences as beautiful.”
In a description of the “Queer Songbook Orchestra Kids” event, “artists from the 2SLGBTQ+ community” weave together story and song as an “interactive exploration of identity and acceptance, intended to nurture understanding and inspire discussion and expression to support of how we feel inside.”
While the event has not been heavily publicized, one reader told LifeSiteNews that it was “extremely shocking and disappointing” to come across an advertisement that “features a drag queen with a beard” in an event marketed towards children.
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Campaign Life Coalition’s Political Operations Director Jack Fonseca similarly expressed his concern with the event, while also admonishing the Progressive Conservative Party and Premier Doug Ford for allowing such a “festival” to receive funding from taxpayers.
“Parents need to keep their children away from this event to protect youngsters from spiritual and psychological harm,” Fonseca said in a statement to LifeSiteNews, adding that there is “nothing ‘family friendly’ about drag queens reading sexualized stories about homosexuality and transvestites to four-year-old children.”
“Knowing that the Doug Ford PC’s are funding this evil with our tax dollars is one more proof that Doug Ford has abandoned conservative voters. He has betrayed the family-friendly, conservative principles that got him elected first as PC Leader when he ran on repealing the Liberal sex-ed program, and then again as Premier of Ontario, on that same promise, along with eliminating ‘Gender Identity Theory’ from our schools. Instead, his government is promoting this twisted ideology and forcing taxpayers – we the suckers who believed his promises – to pay for it with our hard-earned money,” hammered Fonseca.
In light of Ford’s passive acceptance of anti-family policies, as well as his implementation of mask mandates, vaccine passports, and lockdowns during the COVID era, many social conservatives in Ontario are turning their support away from the PCs in the upcoming provincial election on June 2.
Two new pro-life and pro-family parties, the New Blue Party and the Ontario Party, have emerged on the scene and are widely considered to be viable options for those feeling betrayed by the mainstream Progressive Conservative Party under Ford.
Speaking about this phenomenon to LifeSiteNews, Fonseca urges “conservative voters in Ontario not to vote for any of the pro-abortion, anti-family Progressive Conservative candidates just because you fear the NDP and Liberals are even worse.”