When I read recently that Florida was considering a law that would allow any single parent to require that a book be removed from a school library, it occurred to me that it hadn’t occurred to the Florida Fascists that both sides could play that game.
Turns out there’s a similar law in Utah, requiring the removal of any book that has “pornographic” content, the definition of “pornographic” in the bill being quite broad, and in fact, as one in a Blue State where we don’t do these types of things would hope would happen:
A parent is arguing that if banned books like ‘Gender Queer’ are pulled from shelves, the Bible—with its sex scenes, incest, and murder—should be banned, too.
A Utah parent has filed a request to ban God’s most popular blog, the Bible, from schools, citing and ridiculing a law passed last year that removed dozens of books from schools and libraries last year. “Get this PORN out of our schools!” they wrote in their request for the removal of the book.
In 2022, Utah passed a law banning books with “pornographic or indecent” content. The initial list of banned books included many titles that feature coming-of-age stories that also deal with themes of sexuality and gender, including Judy Blume’s Forever…, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, and Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult.
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“Incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide,” the parent wrote in their request, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, which obtained a copy of the request. “You’ll no doubt find that the Bible, under Utah Code Ann. § 76-10-1227, has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition.”
I once decided I would read the entire Bible, but I gave up after concluding it had no redeeming social or literary value. In particular, the Old Testament God is a very nasty fellow. It does, in fact, have quite a few nasty bits, as the linked article notes. Of course, the folks reviewing this request will likely find a reason why the Bible gets a pass, leaving it to some judge down the line to figure out a way to distinguish between “woke” porn and “asleep?” porn.
Oh wait, before putting this post to bed I did a bit more research and it turns out that the Bible is on the hot seat in Florida too.
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