By Caitlyn McCoy
Saint Louis University in Missouri recently announced plans to host a school-sponsored drag show, according to a tip received through Young America’s Foundation’s Campus Bias Tip Line.
The event, hosted by the “Rainbow Alliance,” the Cross Cultural Center, the Division of Innovative Community Engagement, and the Student Involvement Center, will be held next Tuesday evening in the Busch Student Center.
The venue is just steps away from St. Francis Xavier College Church, where last year, a YAF-sponsored Matt Walsh lecture about the pro-life movement and gender ideology was banned. The following semester, the university’s police department was ordered to remove YAF speaker Elisha Krauss, who had traveled from California to advocate for free speech and the Judeo-Christian values upon which the university claims to be based:
“As a Catholic, Jesuit university, this pursuit [of excellence] is motivated by the inspiration and values of the Judeo-Christian tradition and is guided by the spiritual and intellectual ideals of the Society of Jesus,” a page on the university’s website states.
Elaina Falconer, a board member of a conservative organization on campus told YAF, “The University betrays its ‘Jesuit transition’ by holding and advertising this event. Womanhood is not a costume to be worn and mocked.” Falconer continued, “It is insulting that secularized, sexist events are held here, while events that follow the Catholic, Jesuit tradition are considered controversial and off-limits.”
Unfortunately, it’s no surprise that conservative events at SLU are rejected, while events such as this (which explicitly promote the Left’s depraved gender ideology) are approved, funded, and promoted without issue–approvals go through an administrator who self-identifies as a “drag baby.”
Thomas Patterson, who serves as program coordinator for the SLU Student Involvement Center, is a drag baby who goes by the stage name “Misty Terrain.”
According to Patterson’s Instagram profile, which features images of the college administrator wearing a diaper, he has traveled to several other institutions around the nation to perform in drag, and will be competing in the upcoming “Miss Gay USofA” drag race.
“As a conservative Christian student, I’m not a fan of this ‘Catholic’ school being so involved in a drag show,” Carter Fortman, a sophomore at SLU, told YAF. “What makes it so terrible is that the Student Involvement Center is not only allowing, but co-hosting this show, despite turning down every conservative and Catholic speaker we tried to bring to SLU last year,” he added.
When YAF attempted to reach Jackie Weber, Director of the Student Involvement Center, for comment, the office secretary claimed that Weber was in a meeting, and that she doesn’t have access to the director’s calendar to schedule a callback.
Although SLU claims to be a Catholic university, this is far from the first time that Young America’s Foundation has exposed leftist nonsense on campus.
SLU denied students the ability to form a Young Americans for Freedom chapter on campus, citing Young America’s Foundation’s “unprofessional” articles about the university, and claiming that the club would increase tension on campus.
In 2021, the university investigated campus conservatives when they borrowed a line from Matt Walsh, and challenged a leftist organization, the “SLU Sluts,” to provide a definition for the word “woman.” The conservatives were found guilty, and placed on disciplinary probation for a year.
When Walsh spoke at a venue across the street from SLU (since SLU had booted his event from two different venues) in December of last year, the Student Involvement Center placed an advertising ban on the student group that hosted him. A student who promoted the event on public property was threatened with expulsion, and ultimately ordered to complete 50 hours of community service to the university.
Over the summer, YAF exposed that SLU continues to fund its left-leaning organizations disproportionately to its conservative organizations. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were given to liberal student organizations, while the conservative student organizations collectively received $440.
Clearly, SLU remains biased against its conservative and Catholic students, and has no intentions to improve the institution’s rapidly declining reputation.