Law enforcement almost unanimously denounced the move as unconstitutional, and that they would not be enforcing her edict. Her own Attorney General, Democrat Raul Torrez, said he wouldn’t defend her from lawsuits, because her actions were unconstitutional. A federal judge on Wednesday struck down her rule, because it is unconstitutional. And what did Governor Grisham get out of the deal? Not only nothing, but less than nothing. She got spanked from the word go, even by her own political allies, and even she admitted that her actions probably wouldn’t make much of a difference, but that she had to try something to combat this gun violence epidemic.

It was refreshing to see that the Constitution does still seem to matter, even to Democrats, when such an egregious violation banning a guaranteed, enshrined right occurs. But in the United States Senate, Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, held a hearing on another issue of banning – this one on books in school, and tried to frame it as the Republicans being the ones all over the country as the authoritarians. Your mileage may vary, but the hearing pretty much was a confirmation bias event – if you’re a progressive lefty promoting the Alphabet agenda, you got what you wanted out of it. If you’re someone on the side of parents, decency, and common sense, you got what you were looking for as well.

We’ve all heard the rhetoric from the left trying to frame the issue. It’s all about book banning. That’s not at all what the issue is and should be about. The questions we as a society should be debating are what books should and should not be in public school libraries for young people to read? What content is appropriate at what age level, if any age level at all, and whether parents should have a say so in the matter? Or should just be left up to school librarians, administrators and/or school boards? That, to extrapolate from Shakespeare, is the real question. From President Joe Biden on down, the left has tried to paint anyone concerned with blocking sexually explicit material from the available hands and eyes of young children as book banning Nazis.

Here’s another one from Biden.

Kamala Harris has made similar claims. Lots of Democrats have. Republicans, and even some moderate Democratic parents in suburbs who go to school board meetings and get shut down for protesting this material, do the unthinkable, which is to expose exactly what is in these books that’s so offensive.

Durbin started off the hearing festivities with a bald-faced lie, something he has shown an unwavering ability to do. He tried to wave off the concerns of these books being in school libraries by making this bold claim.

Except that’s not true at all. The Democrats on the committee invited an entire panel of expert witnesses that were there to advocate for exactly that, including Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias and others. You’d think that by making that claim, you’d expect what inevitably happened when Louisiana Senator John Kennedy had his five minutes, and boy, did he use it. (Content warning: Extraordinarily graphic sexual depictions in this clip). But that’s the point, isn’t it? If the content of these books are so extreme and shocking to the conscience that we grown-ups can’t bear to hear it be read in public settings, or the FCC bans radio and television from airing it over public airwaves, why in the world are we having a fight over whether it’s age appropriate, or appropriate at all for young kids?

There have been videos by the dozens from school districts around the country where parents and other concerned voices in the community, pastors, priests, civic teachers, etc., have tried this same stunt – reading passages from these books, and immediately have their microphones cut off, they’re shouted down by school board members, and in a lot of cases, security and/or police literally throw them out of the public school board meetings. And this is all being done purportedly while simultaneously proposing Republicans as being the fascists for embracing book banning. Here’s just a recent example of a pastor in Ashville, North Carolina, trying to do what Senator Kennedy did, and what happened to him.

In Carver County, Minnesota, this week, the board got a standing ovation for protecting the inclusion of Gender Queer, one of the books from which Senate Kennedy read aloud.

California is on the cusp of Governor Gavin Newsom signing a bill into law that would ban the practice of banning books. That’s the line in the sand for blue states to campaign on in 2024.

Red states are taking a much different approach. Ron DeSantis addressed this specifically about Florida a couple months ago.

Back at the Senate hearing, it wasn’t all a left-wing witness show. Republicans got to invite witnesses to testify, too, including parent advocate Nicki Neilly. But the star of the show was American Enterprise Institute research fellow Max Eden. Eden gave a masterful performance on the false narrative of the term book banning, and shed light on what’s really going on, encased in plain common sense.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. There are tons of political issues that can and will be in the mix for the 2024 election and the future direction of the country. We are at a pivotal point in our society where even though a vast majority of Americans realize we’re going down the wrong road, and yet we’re still a 50/50 nation on whether we get off this current road to hell and try something else instead. Of all the issue sets to campaign on, few resonate more favorably with more people across the ideological spectrum than parents’ rights and education reform. It’s an issue that any Republican running for any level of government can and should be running on, and it’s an issue that cuts decisively in their favor whenever it’s polled.

If a day on the campaign trail goes by without at least some mention of education reform by a Republican candidate, that candidate is not in it to win it. Relitigating 2020 is a guaranteed loser. Standing on the side of parents against nefarious forces trying to brainwash their kids? I’ll take that side every day of the week. And spare me the charge that I’m for banning books.

The late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1964’s Roth case famously wrote that, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘I can’t define what is hard-core pornography or what is obscene, but I know it when I see it’. One of the leftist panelists on the Senate Judiciary committee hearing this week tried to make the claim that the passages out of All Boys Aren’t Blue, the other book from which Senator Kennedy read, were about sexual abuse, and that it was not erotic.

I’ve read the passages. I know what’s inappropriate for schoolchildren when I read it. If they want to read it as a young adult on their own, they can pick it up on Amazon or purchase it in any bookstore. If it’s in a library in an adult section, that’s fine, too. But is it too much to ask for a modicum of discernment here and not expose children to the classics first? Can they get the high-minded concepts of what is right versus what is prudent? No? How about STEM subjects – things that are practical for what they’re going to need to master in order to compete in the 21st Century global economy? No?

If the ‘it’s sexual abuse, not erotic’ line is the new standard for appropriateness, according to Dick Durbin’s witness, we’d better start streaming PornHub directly into the schools now, because an inordinate amount of that constitutes sexual abuse over eroticism, too. Let’s just get it over with. You might even pick up a few Virginia legislators in the process.