I went to an out-of-state sporting event recently and was surprised to see that a youth dance-and-drumming troupe from my city, just a couple of blocks from our house, preceded us there. The boys drummed, and the girls danced.

At halftime, they marched from the lobby onto the basketball court. They had remarkable stage presence. They knew how to hold an audience’s attention, starting with the throbbing, thunderous pulse of the drums. The girls strode in with eye contact from heads held high, a procession rather than a mere entrance.

Then, at center court, the dancing began. It was quite skillful, even acrobatic. An adult man crouched at courtside holding up fingers and gesticulating to direct the girls. They appeared to range from six or seven years of age to mid-teens.

As the pace quickened and the percussion loudened, the girls’ dancing changed. By the time the drumming climaxed, their dance was vulgar and salacious.

If the crouching man had posted a video of these children’s dance online, instead of presenting them live in a college gymnasium, he might have had legal difficulties. If some of these girls were adults, including some who appeared to be fifth-graders, they would have all the requisite exotic dance moves for employment in an Atlanta strip club.

The audience was mostly middle-aged and older small-town Midwestern folks. They were too polite not to applaud the youngsters who had obviously worked so hard, and traveled so far to entertain them. But they must have thought to themselves that something has gone terribly wrong in America.

There are a lot of good people investing themselves in the encouragement and moral formation of children and adolescents in this country, but we have also trusted some of the wrong people with our children.

Whoever corrupted those little girls should experience strong community disapproval, maybe criminal prosecution. If I were the parent or grandparent of one of those girls, I don’t think I’d be waiting for the prosecutors to take action.

But how much better it would be to proactively intervene and prevent children’s victimization in the first place. We’ve got to be more suspicious, and more assertive. Don’t ever let glib, articulate predators’ allies talk you out of protecting your youngsters. You are under no obligation to accommodate their access to your children.

Child corruption is big business, of course. It’s institutionalized in the music and television industries, and the watchdogs have been compromised.

The Gannett media chain, that recently took over the daily newspaper in my town, has starkly misrepresented public opinion about indecency, and there’s no reason to believe that will ever change. The mainstream media rarely take indecency seriously, except when it serves as a criticism of Donald Trump.

There is no appeasing these people. They respect no boundaries. There is no wholesome refuge from them that they will voluntarily accord us and our families.

Currently, my library is funding and actively collaborating with the San Francisco-based “Drag Queen Story Hour,” in which dolled-up transvestites are invited to read stories to small children.

This travesty has its own national network that solicits contributions by PayPal to San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City offices. ” Drag Queen Story Hour is just what it sounds like,” according to its website, “drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools and bookstores.”

The Gannett machine in our town justified the Story Hour with “science” that indicates people with at least one LGBTQ acquaintance are more likely to support gay marriage. “Acceptance,” according to Gannett, is a virtue worthy of public funding and the exposure of small children to transvestites.

But is it? If so, perhaps we should denounce Martin Luther King for his lack of acceptance of Jim Crow. Perhaps the French Resistance was regrettable for its narrow-minded failure to accept the Nazi occupation of their country.

Come on, Gannett, acceptance is a neutral term and its virtue depends on the merits of the thing being accepted. And to accept the Drag Queen Story Hour’s access to our community’s smallest children would be cavalier, if not cowardly.

Gannett claims the benefits of reading to children justify the library’s Drag Queen event. They write that there is no sexual subject matter in the children’s books that are read by the transvestites.

But the drag queens’ own website tells a different story. “Drag Queen Story Hour captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models,” according to the website. “In spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress-up is real.”

This is OK with the Public Library Association (PLA), which called the Drag Queen Story Hour a “remarkable and important initiative that promotes acceptance and inclusivity.”

The PLA presented a seminar, entitled “Reading Fabulously,” at its annual convention last year listing “best practices” for setting up a Drag Queen Story Hour, and “which titles best support a program for young people exploring gender fluidity.”

The PLA seminar description promised that attendees would “be prepared with strategies and language to explain and, if necessary, defend groundbreaking and potentially controversial programming.”

Will it be necessary? Will we ever dig in our heels against the child corrupters? Drag Queen Story Hour may be a good barometer on American parental apathy: if we don’t mobilize against this shameful campaign by depraved transvestites, public libraries, Gannett and all the other crouching men to corrode our children’s moral character before they can even read, our abandonment of the children may be complete.

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