The trouble at the McLean Community Center started last summer, after the Northern Virginia cultural facility co-sponsored “Drag StoryBook Hour” for children during Pride Month.
Some in the affluent D.C. suburb of nearly 50,000 were outraged, accusing the center’s leaders of imposing their liberal ideology on the preschoolers who listened as drag queens in makeup and brightly patterned outfits read aloud books about gender fluidity.
Now, in an example of how nothing is safe from the nation’s raging culture wars, there is a power struggle underway at the 47-year-old Fairfax County community center whose board is usually occupied with such matters as whether to purchase a ping-pong table for the building or how plans are going for the annual McLean Day family festival, where the board’s elections take place.
Although the volunteer board with no taxing authority is hardly a steppingstone to higher office, this May’s election for three open seats — a contest that usually turns out about 300 voters — has attracted nine candidates. Among them: Katharine Gorka, a former Trump administration official who — along with her husband, Sebastian Gorka, an ex-aide to President Donald Trump — has railed against social equity and inclusion policies such as the one the community center used as a guide in selecting the drag event.
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The local Democratic Party committee is backing three other candidates who support that equity policy, called One Fairfax.
Another three are running as a slate seeking to strike a middle ground, while a retired criminal defense attorney on a crusade to stop the center from using its funds to install electric vehicle charging stations in the parking lot calls the entire organization dysfunctional. Then there’s the former 1980s actress who says she works for the CIA.
Several in the race lamented how the brick-and-glass building that typically hosts concerts or plays among towering oak trees has become its own spectacle.
The facility that boasts of being at “the center of it all” has found itself at the center of something else: the national clamor over culture-war issues such as transgender people’s bathroom use, equity initiatives, “critical race theory” and mask mandates that, in Virginia, swept Republicans into power during the fall.
“I don’t need another school board screaming match,” Lauren Kahn, the retired attorney, said about the community center. “Normally, these elections are uncontroversial. Why do they want to politicize it?”