There are folks who have cried out in anger as statues and other symbols showcasing the Confederacy have been toppled over. These folks say that liberals are trying to hide or whitewash history, that even though these things keep the memory of villains alive, they need to be shown so that our past is properly passed down to future generations. They’re right.

However, some of these folks in Missouri also balked at an exhibit being posted at the state capitol’s museum that told about Missouri’s history with the LGBT rights movement. Horrors, they cry out as they vilify the museum’s employees for having such a display in your face when you step into the capitol, and they succeeded in getting the exhibit removed. They’re wrong.

The Missouri State Museum exhibit, “Making History: Kansas City and the Rise of Gay Rights,” had gone up for four days with banners curated by university students that looked at the LGBT activism in the community with a focus on gay rights in the 1950s. Then a legislative staffer complained about it, and it was taken down, even though it was supposed to be on display through September. Not an actual lawmaker, mind you, but one of the lackeys that works for a legislator.

Uriah Stark, the lackey in question, posted this on Facebook: “So is there any good reason that our taxpayer funded museum is pushing the LGBT agenda in our state capitol? These are literally in-your-face banners that you can’t walk through the museum without seeing… and they’re scheduled to be there through December.” When the exhibit was cleared, Stark followed up with a Facebook comment saying: “Thank God for giving us the victory on this one!”

God had nothing to do with this travesty. It was the act of Republicans who apparently still don’t realize that the “LGBT agenda” isn’t one where everybody is going to be forced to have sex with someone of the same gender or to flip genders entirely, but one where everybody is free to live how they choose and love how they choose. It’s an antiquated mindset that brings the “cancel culture” of today to the other side.

Two days after Stark’s public hysteria, the exhibit was removed, according to an article in the Kansas City Star, with a spokeswoman for the governor claiming the official reason that it was cancelled was because state statute requires the Department of Natural Resources, which manages the museum, to coordinate museum activities with the state’s Board of Public Buildings.

That sounds like a logical and common sense response on the surface. It would be like someone setting up a campsite on your front lawn without asking you if it was all right to infringe on your property.

However, the newspaper revealed that minutes going back to 2015 have indicated that no state museum exhibits, much less the “Making History” one, have ever been discussed, let alone approved, so that makes the current action seem a little — what’s the word I’m looking for — discriminatory, and isn’t discrimination supposed to be naughty in this day and age?

The action has set off the state’s only openly gay member of the senate, Greg Razer, who told the newspaper he’d been happily surprised to see the exhibit go up in a state that’s redder than Reba McEntire’s hair and was equally outraged when the exhibit was yanked.

Razer told the Star: “The story that that exhibit told is the story of how I get to stand on the Senate floor in the first place. Thirty years ago, there wouldn’t be an openly gay man in the state Senate.” He went on to call it an act of bigotry and questioned whether LGBT people would be welcome in Missouri’s state parks.

I’m going to digress for just a moment and ask how a museum falls under the jurisdiction of the Department of Natural Resources. When I think of natural resources, I think of trees, rivers and animals. Museums are definitely valuable resources in our world, but I wouldn’t call them “natural.”

The “Making History” exhibit has an online presence that shows much of what was on display at the capitol at https://info.umkc.edu/makinghistory. I glanced through it and found some of the information enlightening, including something called the “homophile movement.” These were basically the early versions of gay alliances where homosexuals organized formally to create a sense of community and deemphasize the sexual aspect that made folks in the 1950s wig out.

One of those organizations, the Phoenix Society, formed in 1966 with the help of Missouri native Drew Shafer and helped to welcome Kansas City’s gay community with publication of a magazine and creating the Phoenix House in 1968 as an LGBT community center. However, homophile movements like the Phoenix Society soon had to give way to militant younger activists who started pushing for more aggressive activities akin to the Black power movement following the Stonewall Riots.

This is the history that folks should learn about, not just in Missouri, but everywhere. We’re already fractured in this country along racial and gender lines, and trying to shove LGBT society back in the closet is making a bad situation worse. If the folks at the Missouri statehouse were smart, they’d let the exhibit go back up, run its course and then move on to another educational aspect.

Judging from the comments in the Star story and Stark’s Facebook post, folks in that state aren’t that smart.