OPINION:
Warning: Some of the language in this editorial may be offensive to some readers.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has been in office less than six months, but the Democrat has wasted little time in reflexively embracing every sexual shibboleth of the far left.
It’s enough to make us miss Mr. Moore’s centrist predecessor, Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan.
By pushing to spend more than $1.3 million in taxpayer funds stocking the state’s medicine chest with a ready reserve of the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol to make it “very, very clear that reproductive freedom is nonnegotiable” in the Free State and declaring June as “LGBTQIA+ Pride Month in Maryland,” Mr. Moore has made no pretense of following Mr. Hogan’s moderate model.
In his effusive “Pride Month” declaration, Mr. Moore made it clear he’s no Blue Dog, center-left Democrat.
“We need to elevate the stories, embrace the courage, and celebrate the humanity of our LGBTQIA+ community,” he said, “and as long as I am governor, we will take the steps forward to protect and celebrate all Marylanders.”
In his Pride Month proclamation — “which was last issued in 2013,” he noted, apparently to chastise his two-term GOP predecessor for failing to do so — Mr. Moore made this preposterous assertion:
“More than 500,000 residents in Maryland identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, agender, asexual, aromantic, and additional gender and sexual identities.”
We have no idea where the governor got that number, but it’s absurd and patently false on its face, because for it to be true, fully 8.1% of Maryland’s population of 6.165 million — or 1 in 12 Marylanders — would have to be LGBTQ, and no one but Mr. Moore himself seriously believes that.
But it’s no surprise, coming as it did from a governor who, on March 31, boasted that he had become the first governor in the state’s history to proclaim “Transgender Day of Visibility” in the state.
Transgender people account for an estimated 0.003% of the population, making them a microscopically small special interest group — but one with vastly disproportional clout, as Mr. Moore’s gubernatorial proclamation attests.
If all of that weren’t enough to win the Maryland governor an A-plus rating from the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD, surely his latest genuflection to the rainbow mafia will — even if (or perhaps because) it was something of a Freudian slip.
Appearing on June 18 on left-wing MSNBC, Mr. Moore made the hyperbolic claim that the removal of explicit, pornographic and age-inappropriate LGBTQ books from classrooms and school libraries was akin to castrating children.
“I continue hearing people making the argument that we’re doing it because we want to prevent our students from having discomfort or guilt,” Mr. Moore told former White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, the latest in a conga line of former Democratic operatives to get a lucrative TV hosting gig.
“It’s not about making kids feel uncomfortable. It’s about telling other kids that they shouldn’t understand their own power,” Mr. Moore added. “It’s castrating them.”
Setting aside that it’s actually the transgender medical-industrial complex that is castrating children, both chemically and surgically, we will venture a guess that the Democratic governor has never seen — much less read — the books in question before making his irresponsible, knee-jerk claims.
Unlike Mr. Moore, syndicated columnist David Harsanyi has read them and was appalled at what he found — both text and illustrations.
Mr. Harsanyi has challenged President Biden — who has also reflexively criticized the removal of the books, despite almost certainly knowing little or nothing of their salaciousness — to “read selected outtakes from some of these ‘innocuous’ books to prepubescent kids.”
We would extend that challenge to the president’s fellow Democrat in Maryland.
Among the books at the center of the controversy is “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison, which among other things describes two 10-year-old boys performing oral sex on each other: “‘What if I told you I touched another guy’s d—k?’ I said. … ‘I was ten years old, but it’s true. I put Doug Goble’s d—k in my mouth.’”
Then there’s this excerpt from “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, which — whether the double entendre is intentional or not — is called a “graphic novel”: “I got off once while driving just by rubbing the front of my jeans and imagining getting a b—- j-b.”
And these are just two of the many such books inappropriately targeting guileless, impressionable young children, but which Mr. Moore appears to think are perfectly acceptable. Yet, the left adamantly insists the LGBTQ left isn’t “grooming” children.
There are good reasons that Hustler and other adult magazines aren’t available in school classrooms and libraries. Books such as “Lawn Boy” and “Gender Queer” shouldn’t be either, period, full stop — Mr. Moore’s ill-informed, libertine protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.
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