As the ongoing culture war continues, the fight for Freedom to Read meets a new wrinkle that could make the battle interesting; in ultra-conservative St Charles, outside StLouis, a protestor to their proposed book(and display)-banning cited the Bible as “glorifying violence”–see below from 8/18 St Louis Post-Dispatch for story:
ST. CHARLES COUNTY — Books including scenes depicting sex, child birth, witchcraft, drug use and graphic violence have been the topic of heated debate for more than a year at St. Charles City-County Library board meetings.
Now, a patron has asked the board to consider a different type of text: the Bible.
Brian Roorda of St. Peters has filed a challenge to remove the King James Version of the Bible due to, he said, its repeated descriptions of acts of violence.
Roorda specifically cites a verse from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament, which suggests that anyone who causes a believer of Jesus Christ to stumble or sin should have a “large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
of course, using their standards, the Bible 'glorifies violence", but also incest, child sacrifice, rape, violence against women to go along with calling then unclean, promoting 'socialism", and .of course, genocide. So why not ban the Bible?
This isn’t new. Every single open school board meeting in history that has discussed book banning will 100% have someone stand up and say that the Bible contains all the sex and violence necessary to include it on the proposed list.
Usually these kinds of book banning have to do with restricting children’s access to such naughty books. In OP’s case, if this is a library board meeting, are they trying to ban them from the library altogether?
I, who was a child in the 50s and so had access only to the most innocuous of books, was thoroughly corrupted by the lack of information. Sex was such a mystery that it was all the more attractive when I finally had access, and all the more likely to ensnare me with its luscious appeal. I wonder if that’s what my parents had in mind when they failed to discuss anything sex-related even once when I was growing up (probably not, I think it was just cowardice).
Yahweh commands the Israelites to commit genocide:
In the Hebrew Bible, passages describe God (Yahweh) commanding the Israelites to completely destroy certain groups living in Canaan, such as the Amalekites, Midianites, and various Canaanite nations. These commands, often using the term herem (total destruction), directed Israel to spare no one.
So, a nutcase made a proposal, that was not followed up, and that is “book banning”?
Yep, but usually nothing is done. And even if something is done, it i something like a reading list being changed.- for example Maus was not “banned”- they just changed the 8th grade reading list. The book was still in the school library. Reading lists get changed all the time.
In the 1920, reading lists for High schools often had the The Scarlett Letter, Ivanhoe, MacBeth, The Last of the Mohicans, and students were expected to memorize The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Now it is commonly To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo & Juliet, Lord of the Flies and Animal farm (these are common, but by no means everywhere).
Also Libraries have limited room, they cant keep every book on the shelf, they constantly remove and add books.
If books are banned based on content like sex and violence then why not include the bible which has that?
It highlights the hypocrisy of the book banners.
To be clear…I am not for banning any books. Bible or whatever else (some adult content like porn should not be in a library but even that comes with a big gray area…what did the Supreme Court say about it? “I know it when I see it.” )
I absolutely hate performative legislation, even when I’m on the side of the person doing the performance. Like the lawmaker in Mississippi who, fed up with his colleagues’ obsession with regulating women’s bodies, introduced the “Contraception Begins at Erection Act” (Senate Bill 2319), which would basically ban ejaculating with any intent other than to induce pregnancy. Har har, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Chuckle chuckle. Yes, I hate the idea of legislatures regulating women’s bodies, but I also hate introducing satirical leglislation to make a point. When I become God-King of Missouri, the first law I’m passing will ban performative legislation.
Attempts to ban the Bible are performances meant to call attention to the hypocrisy of book banning. We all get it: keeping the Bible on the shelves while banning Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret is hypocritical in the extreme, and also anti-intellectual, misogynistic, and words like that. Let’s all quit with the performance art. No book should be banned, and the Bible absolutely belongs on the shelves of school libraries. It is foundational to Western culture in a myriad of ways not worth listing here.
I know the “let’s ban the Bible, then” is an attempt to point out the hypocrisy of the book banning crowd. However, I’m sure most in that crowd would be absolutely delighted if the only Bible available to kids were their favorite kid friendly story book version of the Bible.
(And yes, I’m sure there are also some who think that the full King James version, or whatever, of the Bible is the only holy version, and all others are false idols, and draw an exception because Bible sex and violence is the word of God, not the word of some (probably Satan worshipping) human author.)
I’m certain there’s a lot of spiritual value to a story about a guy passing out drunk naked and his son then accidentally seeing his junk. And then the guy puts a curse on his grandson because…well, for good reasons, I’m sure.
So, if you find your two-year old coloring on the walls with his crayons, tell him to not do that – it makes the wall ugly and you don’t like that. A week later he’s coloring the walls again. “Oh, well. I told him I don’t like it. Telling him is just performance disciplining so what’s the point of doing it?”
They keep hypocritin’ either not recognizing it for what it is or not caring. Either way I see no reason to not keep calling for what it is.
Rule: No non-school-related announcements go home with students
Some parents: We’d like to the school to announce that our church is having a fun festival open to all next Saturday. It’s mean of the school not to let that be announced.
School: Okay, announcements of community events open to all are okay
Parents (the same parents as above): Johnny heard an announcement at school about a fun fair at the local mosque! This must me stopped.
School: No non-school-related announcements are allowed at school.
P.S. J. Michael Straczynski got the Bible removed from a school library by reading passages out loud at a school board meeting. This was not even his intent - he wanted the library to reconsider its policies, but their policy was so rigid that they had to remove the Bible (and had no way around their zero-tolerance policy), leaving him in an awkward position (since he didn’t want the Bible removed - he wanted the rules corrected. After some death threats (to JMS) the school library figured it out.
Yeah, these tactics do tend to result in “Look at the evil godless libruls attacking the Bible!”, even though it’s actually the conservatives doing the attacking.
True. But Libraries do that on objective criteria, like their records of how often the book has been checked out recently.
Attempts to remove books based on people’s opinion of what is ‘objectionable’ rather than facts often backfire. When I served on the county Library Foundation, we had a local group decide to remove books they objected to – mostly teen books with LGBT characters – by checking them out, and extending their checkouts, thus keeping the books off the library shelves for some time. But the algorithm that monitored the library catalog noted that, and these books popped up on the lists of ‘heavy-demand’ books, so the library bought more copies. Not what those people wanted!