FLORIDA GOVERNOR DeSantis Strips Liquor License From Hotel That Held Drag Show with Kids Present
BY ROBERT SPENCER
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Aside from some grumbling from social conservatives, the Hyatt Regency Miami likely never dreamed it would suffer any consequences for hosting “A Drag Queen Christmas.” The sexually explicit celebration of our current societal obsessions took to the stage last December — with children present. After all, the big corporations have thoroughly internalized the principle that it is Leftists they must never offend, while they can infuriate patriots all day long. That’s why they’ve all gone woke.
But now, for the first time, Ron DeSantis is making sure that these Leftist corporate behemoths will pay a price for pandering to today’s cultural saboteurs. The Hyatt Regency Miami is losing its liquor license.
Fox News reported Tuesday that “the DeSantis administration is moving to strip a major Miami hotel of its liquor license after hosting a Christmas-themed drag queen show in December with children present despite warnings.” With this and DeSantis’ earlier actions against the woke propagandists of Disney, we have done nothing less than enter into a new world. For the first time, corporations are seeing that they might suffer the adverse effects of tilting far to the Left and outraging the sensibilities of their customers who still retain a modicum of decency and sanity.
The Hyatt Regency Miami can’t say that it didn’t see it coming. The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation issued a warning to the luxurious hotel against hosting a “sexually explicit show with children present,” but the hotel ignored the warning. Now it is discovered that the warning was not just empty verbiage. The Department explained that as a result of the hotel’s hosting the show in defiance of the warnings, it was “revoking the venue’s license for the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages.” It added that “sexually explicit content is not appropriate to display to children and doing so violates Florida law. Governor DeSantis stands up for the innocence of children in the classroom and throughout Florida.”
There was abundant reason for this action. According to a complaint filed by the same Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, at the “Drag Queen Christmas” event, which had been advertised as suitable for all ages, “performers showed their prosthetic breasts and genitals, rubbed their prosthetic female breasts on the faces and mouths of audience members, intentionally exposed their rears, were ‘simulating masturbation’ and had ‘graphic depictions of childbirth and/or abortion.’”
Even all that wasn’t enough. Behind the performers, videos were shown on screens, displaying “exposed female breasts with less than a fully opaque covering, portrayals of simulated masturbation, and other sexually explicit content.” The show also featured “perverted versions of popular children’s Christmas songs,” including a version of “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” that featured a “portrayal of oral fellatio” and the words “I’ll sit on his lap, he can put his milk and cookies all between my gap.” All this went on as children gawked, having been brought to the event by some who thought they were going to get a benign Christmas presentation.
They thought so because the event “was initially promoted by the hotel with Christmas-themed materials that did not warn of sexually explicit content and included the words ‘all ages welcome.’” Of course, all ages were welcome. How can you ensure that little kids will be watching all this if you warn the prospective audience that you’re going to be rubbing their faces in the worst of twenty-first-century America’s obsession with sexual deviancy and perversion?
The hotel did update the promotional material after it received its initial warning from the state. The new ads noted that the show was “recommended for audiences 18+,” but according to Fox, “the admission policies still allowed for children to attend if accompanied by an adult.” The state’s complaint against the hotel thus states: “As a result, minors attended and were knowingly admitted. During the Show and in the presence of persons less than 16 years of age, performers appeared on stage wearing sexually suggestive clothing and prosthetic female genitalia.”
Hyatt Regency Miami’s general manager, Amir Blattner, said that the venue was actually managed by a third party. Maybe so, but it clearly went on under the hotel’s auspices, and I myself can recall having patriotic and anti-jihad terror events canceled from other Hyatts, so I suspect it would be hard for the hotel to sustain the claim that it is viewpoint-neutral.
DeSantis’ action is on the right track. The more the woke corporations come to see that there is a downside to wokeness, the more they’ll swing back to treating all groups equally. How refreshingly American that would be.