Missouri has taken steps to protect its children from libidinous library books. Kansas obviously hasn’t.

Why in the world not?

Last week The Heartlander found a talking children’s book in the Johnson County, Kansas, library – The GayBCs – that teaches the ABCs using sexual terms such as trans, intersex, bi(sexual), pan(sexual) – and introduces preschoolers to such ideas as being nonbinary.

The book tells even toddlers such things as “B is for BI,” “D is for DRAG,” “G is for GAY,” “L is for LESBIAN” and “Q is for QUEER.”

“This and other books are for grooming our children for anything-goes when it comes to sex,” alarmed Johnson County grandmother Debbie Detmer told us.

The Johnson County Library remains wholly unconcerned, saying it simply won’t judge any of its content, even for age appropriateness.

So, unless Kansas citizens or state leaders do so, it will indeed be anything goes for the youngest of the state’s children.

After months of public input, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft last month enacted a rule prohibiting the use of state funds to buy sexually explicit material geared toward minors, and requiring libraries to create policies on the age-appropriateness of materials for minors and allowing citizens to challenge such materials. The results of such challenges also must be announced on the library’s website.

“It is more difficult than ever to shield young children from material and images that would’ve been put behind the counter at the Kum & Go just a few years ago,” Ashcroft writes in a new op-ed. “As an elected official, one of my responsibilities is to make sure government doesn’t make it more difficult for parents to exercise control over their children’s upbringing, and I strongly believe that, when it comes to our schools and public libraries, parents should be in charge. …

“Far from ‘book banning,’ as progressive activists howl, it is merely making sure that materials inappropriate for young kids are identified for parents in those libraries that rely on the taxpayers for funding. … To this end, my one-page rule simply requires libraries to have publicly accessible policies for determining the age appropriateness of materials, while allowing parents to control their child’s access to materials.”

Such a statement used to be labeled “common sense” – if it needed to be said at all, which it didn’t. Yet, reaction to the rule has been hysterical, in both senses of the word. A measure protecting kids from obscene and lewd materials has been deemed by the media to be “controversial.” Let that sink in.

As Ashcroft notes, cries of “book banning” have been heard throughout the hills – even though no one claims movies are being “banned” when we designate them unfit for children, and no one yells that tobacco or alcohol are being “banned” by prohibiting their use by minors.

The book banning argument is specious and dishonest, and they know it.

So is the argument that you’re being “phobic” – in other words, fearful, ignorant, cowardly – if you disagree with the hypersexualization of society or the sexual indoctrination of innocent children. Or if you don’t worship at the Church of Perpetual Self-Absorption, where self-gratification is a holy sacrament.

Just as specious and dishonest is the labeling of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act as the “Don’t Say Gay Bill.” That’s a lie, and those telling it know it – though local news anchors dutifully parrot the lie while reading left-wing wire reports. The act merely “prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through 3rd grade.”

That’s apparently too much to ask in today’s super-sexualized society. It’s seen as radical to want to protect the youngest of children from prurient materials and sexual grooming.

Is that why Kansas hasn’t taken any steps to protect its children, as Missouri’s secretary of state has? Because it’s “controversial”? Do they not realize the sexualization of the youngest of children is taking place right here in the Sunflower State?

Hardly anything shocks me anymore, but two things certainly do: the accelerating depravity of American culture – particularly the indoctrination and sexualization of children – and Americans’ implicit acceptance of it, or at least our silent abiding of it.