I was going to make this tale an ethics quiz, but decided that we’ve settled this issue before.
Dr. Shane Murnan had been the principal at John Glenn Elementary School in Oklahoma City since June. After he was hired, The Libs of TikTok revealed last September that he was an extracurricular drag queen, and placed photos of him as “Shantel Mandalay” on social media. Predictably, conservatives pounced and demanded that he be fired, while the school defended him. The uproar intensified, however, and Shantel was eventually placed on administrative leave.
Now he has resigned, finding that the scrutiny and criticism from social media and elsewhere is too much to bear.
Upon reflection, I realized that this is just a variation on the Naked Teacher Principle. (This story might be the most similar.) Just as there is no reason why a teacher can’t be effective at teaching children while exhibiting herself naked elsewhere, there is no reason why a school principal can’t be a drag queen on his own time and still function effectively as a school administrator…until his worlds collide. Then, as with a teacher whose salacious images are discovered online, his position may become untenable, and if it does, he has no one to blame but himself.
Dr. Murnan had another problem that didn’t help: 20 years ago he had been charged with child pornography, and the charges had been dropped. Apparently the school was aware of this when Murnan was hired. If you think I’m going to advocate penalizing an educator for charges that were never proven after this post, re-think please. I can’t discern from the reports whether he had informed the school officials before he was hired about his colorful and controversial hobby. He had an obligation to do that, and the reason why is now apparent.
However, the Drag Queen school principal is just an embodiment of the Naked Teacher Principle in, uh, different clothing.
Ethics Alarms 
Of course he has to resign or be fired. No one who engages in conduct accurately associated with the perversion of children and the encouragement of mental instability and confusion and in many cases the actual physical and sexual abuse of children should be entrusted with any institution that directly acculturates children.
That’s flat out obvious.
Thank goodness this was discovered.
I don’t know if anyone else has had similar issues with HR, but the HR department at my former job prohibited us from asking applicants about their hobbies. In Wyoming, we would really like to know if an applicant enjoyed hunting, fishing, hiking, skiing, and other outdoor activities, and whether they were okay being hundreds of miles from the nearest shopping mall. We also wanted to know if they were married, and what their spouses thought of living such a rural life. All of those questions were off the table, because it might get the company in trouble with discrimination lawsuits. (Yeah, we wanted to discriminate: we were biased against candidates that we thought wouldn’t last a year!) We more or less hedged around that by asking the approved “Is there anything else you’d like to share about yourself?”
My guess is that if there is something that is not public record, that doesn’t show up in a background check, but could jeopardize the chance of landing a job, most people would refrain from sharing. If this drag-queen hobby was something that Murnan kept to small, private clubs and never thought would leak out (and did not involve the sexualizing of children), then this Libs of TikTok revelation seems to smack of a hit job. However, as long as Libs of TikTok is keeping to her modus operandi, and only sharing what has been posted to TikTok, then Murnan was an idiot for posting.
I know I have an immediate bias against drag queens, and I agree somewhat with Michael West’s lumping all of them in a group seeking the perversion of children. However, I do struggle with the distinction between drag queens (in an adult setting) and live-action role playing. I play Dungeons and Dragons and enjoy playing the role of some hero on a quest, and it is interesting and even challenging playing a character that is very different from me. (In a similar vein, I find it interesting and challenging to write characters that are very different from me.) There is a definite line that is crossed when the drag queen shindig passes into disordered sexual behavior, but is the more “classic” role of drag queen (cross-dressing and acting a diva) benign enough to have not crossed that line? And where does Murnan’s hobby fall against that line?