A school district in Oklahoma is standing by its decision to hire a drag queen as one of its elementary school principals. The story of Shane Brent Murnan is more shocking than that sentence indicates.

In 2001, when Murnan was teaching fifth graders in Stillwater, Oklahoma, he was arrested and charged with having images of children under 18 on his computer. There was no doubt, as a state appellate court judge said, that the pictures “do represent child pornography.” However, Murnan offered in his defense the fact that the pictures, which he had deleted, came to him by accident. The appellate court therefore ordered that his conviction should be reversed. One can’t help wondering what led to the raid on his computer in the first place, of course…

With his conviction on child porn reversed, Murnan pled guilty to a misdemeanor for pot possession, while keeping his teaching certificate. In October 2003, even that charge was expunged.

By 2004, with a clean record, Murnan launched his new career as a drag queen named Shantel Mandalay and entered the world of drag pageants. Judging by the photos, he was a hideous, grotesque parody of a real woman.

Image: Shantel Mandalay, aka Shane Murnan, an elementary school principal. Facebook video screen grab.

In 2018, Murnan jumped on the drag queen story hour phenomenon and got the chance to bring his creepiness to children across Oklahoma City’s library system. As always, one must ask (rhetorically, of course) why these people whose lives revolve around sexual perversion feel compelled to share their fetishes with children.

Murnan’s drag persona didn’t keep him out of the classroom. According to V1SUT, he spent the next eight years teaching in various Oklahoma elementary schools. V1SUT points out that the schools were poor rural and urban schools. At the urban schools, many of the students were not English speakers. In other words, writes V1SUT, “These are vulnerable kids.” Additionally, these are not premium schools where the best teachers go. In terms of staff, schools like this take when they can get.

V1SUIT has lots of information about how Murnan linked his drag persona to his teaching. Indeed, he linked it so much that he posted pictures of school children’s activities on his drag Facebook page. Gay and drag publications made a big deal about his role as a teacher.

Murnan also hates Christianity. That’s the big secret of the whole transgender enterprise, of which drag performing is a subset: It’s a big F U at the Judeo-Christian worldview, which has as its foundation God’s creation of the gender binary, along with a moral system predicated on the nuclear family headed by a man and a woman.

Something bad involving Murnan happened in 2020:

In late 2020, during Murnan’s time at Prairie Queen ES, the state entered a new Criminal Probable Cause Initial Filing with Murnan as the defendant. It is unknown at this time what crime is or was being investigated but the case was assigned to Judge Kevin C. McCray.

Despite that mysterious little run-in with the law, the badly mismanaged John Glenn Elementary School in Oklahoma City’s Western Heights district hired Murnan, perhaps because, like Mrs. Joe Biden, he puts the word “doctor” before his name. He’s now the principal at John Glenn Elementary School. As with Murnan’s previous places of employment, this is a school filled with poor, vulnerable children.

When it hired Murnan, the school board knew about his alter ego, although V1SUT says that it’s unknown whether the board knew about his 2000 arrest (and given the expungement, the board couldn’t act on that knowledge even if it did know). It’s also unknown whether the board knew about the apparently ongoing criminal investigation.

But again, the core point is that the board knew about Murnan’s obsessively sexualized double life and his fetishistic behavior—yet it still handed him an elementary school filled with vulnerable children. You can find here many more details about that school board and the school system, and I urge that you read them. Suffice it to say that, having had its hiring practices exposed, the district is unrepentant:

I really don’t have anything to add to these facts, other than to make an important point that few of us think about when we consider how schools work: The schools have 30 hours per week (or so) of unfettered access to our children. They also control all communications with parents. That is complete narrative control.

What’s missing is a way for parents to communicate with each other. In a school district made up of poor, working parents, many of whom don’t speak English, their inability to communicate with each other makes it difficult for them to know what’s happening in classrooms and to share that knowledge with others. I’m sure that more would protest if they had the same communication abilities schools do.