How would parents feel if the Bible itself were banned due to the very censorship laws they are advocating?
Already done:
- Utah district bans Bible in elementary and middle schools after complaint calls it "sex-ridden", CBS News, 05 June 2023:
quote:
A suburban school district in Utah has banned the Bible in elementary and middle schools after a parent frustrated by efforts to ban materials from schools argued that some Bible verses were too vulgar or violent for younger children. And the Book of Mormon could be next.
The 72,000-student Davis School District north of Salt Lake City removed the Bible from its elementary and middle schools while keeping it in high schools after a committee reviewed the Scriptures in response to a parental complaint. The district has removed other titles, including Sherman Alexie's "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" and John Green's "Looking for Alaska," following a 2022 state law requiring districts to include parents in decisions over what constitutes "sensitive material."
You know, lusting after donkey dicks, Lot's daughters incestuously raping their own father, etc.
And articles on this include fears that the Book of Mormon would be next to be banned.
- The Bible is among dozens of books removed from this Texas school district, NPR, 18 August 2022:
quote:
Students at the Keller Independent School District outside Fort Worth, Texas, went back to school Wednesday. But instead of the focus being on their return, much of the attention has been heaped on an email that was sent out the day before, instructing school staff to pull all copies of a list of more than 40 books from classrooms and school libraries.
The books that were pulled include the graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank's diary, all versions of the Bible and numerous books with LGBTQ+ themes or characters. The School Board did not say why the Bible and the Anne Frank book were removed, but parents had objected to them, according to the list.
- Numerous articles of attempts to ban the Bible in Florida in response to which politicians hypocritically rationalized blocking it.
Actual banning has resulted in public outrage (including from the politician who wrote and pushed through that Utah law), but what else should they expect? When you give every single "parent" veto power, they're going to use it -- I used scare quotes because of the many instances of "outraged parents" at school board meetings have been outside MAGAt agitators.
The irony is that all the MAGAt rhetoric about "parents' rights" are actually designed to deprive parents of any rights regarding their children's education.
I see a parallel to a novel in which everybody went to Hell because the criteria for Damnation included the existence of any religious group who believed that your group was damned; since virtually every religion believes that of all other religions, everybody went to Hell.
With these book banning laws, if even one parent objects to a book, then it gets banned. The logical consequence would be empty libraries, since every book could have at least one parent objecting to it: no science books, no history books, no creationist books, no medical books (too many explicit graphics), no dictionaries (the
words!), etc.
™ Version 4.2
