The Florida Senate asserted its priorities Wednesday afternoon. The vote was 31-9.

It was a matter of state trust funds. One considered worth protecting. Others? Not so much.

The governor's rather fanciful proposed budget depends on extracting $584.4 million from 32 state trust funds. The Senate voted Wednesday to inoculate the single most precious of these funds from such unseemly meddling.

Just to be clear, the pool of money deemed sacrosanct by the Senate was not the trust fund created by Florida law in 1999 to ``provide a perpetual source of enhanced funding for state children's health programs, child welfare programs, children's community-based health and human services initiatives, elder programs, and biomedical research activities related to tobacco use.''

Not hardly. The Senate majority was not at all perturbed by the governor's plan to plunder $230 million from the Lawton Chiles Endowment Fund. Nor was it bothered by the prospect of robbing $101 million from the state's affordable-housing trust fund. Or by taking money from the land-acquisition trust fund. Or the fund earmarked to help welfare recipients move onto the work force.

Thirty-one brave senators, however, were willing to stand up to any budget bully who would diminish the concealed-firearm permit trust fund. A similar majority is expected to vote a companion bill out of the House. Florida's legislators brook no doubts about their priorities. Gun nut paranoia gets preferential consideration over children's health.

``I'm all for protecting trust funds,'' said Sen. Nan Rich, D-Weston, who was on the losing side of Wednesday's vote. ``But why single out the concealed gun fund above all others?''

ANOTHER GUN VICTORY

Because the gun lobby loosed another wacky they're-plotting-to-take-our-guns-away Internet campaign last summer after the Legislature raided 35 trust funds to repair a depleted budget, including a bit of the excess money collected from gun-sale fees. The monies in that trust fund are earmarked for criminal-background checks and other costs of the concealed-gun permit program. The NRA called the budgeting maneuver ``a sneak attack on gun owners.''

Gov. Charlie Crist promptly vetoed the offending measure. It was the only trust fund raid he found offensive in last year's budget, which would seem to make the bill now wending its way through the Legislature a moot exercise. It's not as if anyone would dare suggest borrowing from the holy gun fund and risk the ire of the mighty gun lobby.

NRA FLEXES ITS MUSCLE

The NRA, however, likes to demonstrate its daunting political power, occasionally pushing a law most Floridians find irrational, just for the fun of it. Like the 2008 take-your-gun-to-work law that the gun lobby shoved through despite objections from the the Florida Chamber of Commerce, the Florida Retail Federation and Walt Disney World.

Sen. Rich said another bizarre bill championed by the gun lobby this session would bar the state adoption agency from inquiring whether prospective parents have firearms in the home. The question was designed to discover whether would-be parents have taken steps to keep guns safely away from children. But that will soon be a forbidden inquiry.

``It's going to pass,'' Rich predicted. ``It makes no sense, but it's going to pass.''

Just a matter of priorities.