Texas town holds separate Christmas parades amid backlash over drag queen float with children

A Texas town held separate Christmas parades this year after a group of local churches booted an LGBT group from the event when it featured drag queens during last year's celebration.

The annual Christmas parade in Taylor, Texas, a city of about 15,000 people approximately 30 miles northeast of Austin, has historically been hosted by the Taylor Area Ministerial Alliance (TAMA), which is an organization of local churches "that holds to traditional biblical and family values," according to TAMA.

TAMA issued a statement in November explaining that they would be banning Taylor Pride from the town's annual parade after the group "made it into the parade due to an unfortunate oversight" that saw two men dressed as women in a float with children.

The Town of Taylor held a separate parade this year that allowed any group that wished to participate.

"To be clear, the group known as Taylor Pride, which seeks to promote the LBGTQ+ lifestyle as biblically accepted, with two men inappropriately dressed as women, should never have been allowed to participate and put their promotion on display to families who had no warning about what was coming," TAMA said in their statement.

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TAMA acknowledged that they have never maintained "Christian or religious theme requirements" for participants in the parade, a policy they noted "remains completely unchanged." But they explained they took measures to this year to "ensure that no participant under [TAMA] explicitly contradicts, with their entry, what our entire organization is built on, the Word of God."

The organization went on to decry what they suggested is a shifting definition of what is "family friendly." The video of last year's float in question included two men dressed as women, including one adorned with large prosthetic breasts who sang "All I Want For Christmas Is You" with children sitting behind him.

"Up until very recently, the idea of gaudy and overtly sexualized transvestites being put on public display during a parade which celebrates the biblical event of Jesus Christ being born into this world to save sinners like all of us would understandably have been unthinkable," the statement added.

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Amid the controversy, the Taylor City Council held a meeting last Thursday to debate a proposed update to the guidelines concerning event co-sponsorship requests for the city’s Christmas parades.

A spokesperson for the Town of Taylor, a self-professed "progressive, growing city," told Fox News Digital that they sponsored a separate parade for all groups because TAMA was "explicitly trying to exclude a specific group of people."

"We represent an entire city, a lot of different people who are diverse and have different cultural backgrounds and different ideologies, and we didn't want anyone to feel like they could not participate in the parade," the spokesperson said.

"Because the city has worked really hard over the last few years to be more inclusive, and more accepting of all people. And so to compromise the city decided to hold their own parade," the spokesperson continued.

Regarding whether the town supports a float decked out with drag queens and children, the spokesperson said, "I don't have any comment."

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"The city council of Taylor has put themselves on the naughty list this Christmas season," Jonathan Covey, director of policy for Texas Values, told local KVUE. "Their 'woke' ideology and war on Christmas is unconstitutional and harming people of faith. They must immediately reject this radical LGBT policy and represent their constituents with common sense. Drag queens don’t belong in Christmas."