A veteran teacher was fired by a private Christian school in Texas for attending a drag show in her own time and posting about in on social media.
Drag performances have become a popular recent target for numerous Republican-controlled states that have proposed or enacted laws restricting or criminalizing such shows.
The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, signed into law last month a bill that outlaws drag performances in the presence of children.
Leaders of the First Baptist Academy in Baytown ruled that Kristi Maris, a teacher at the school for 19 years, had breached a condition of employment requiring her to “act in a godly and moral fashion at work, on Facebook and in my community”.
Maris told ABC13 of Houston she agreed to the condition, but did not realize it prevented her attending a drag show, or sharing photographs or videos of it. In a Facebook post, she said the entertainment was “a blast”.
A co-worker who joined her at the show, hosted at Hamburger Mary’s, a popular drag venue and bar in downtown Houston, was also fired.
“I feel like we were treated like criminals,” Maris told the TV station.
“They’re entertainers. We were in disbelief. We still are. We were heartbroken. We had relationships with parents and the kids, and I didn’t even get to say goodbye to a lot of the kids.”
Maris said she was a devoted Christian and taught her students that God loved them all equally. “We should love everybody, and that’s what we’ve been teaching, but they’re expecting us not to do that,” she said.
School officials did not respond to requests from local media for comment. A spokesperson for Hamburger Mary’s told the Houston Chronicle it would host another show to raise money for the fired teachers.
