Over one hundred Bible-toting parents and children joined Republican lawmakers at the Utah state Capitol this Wednesday to protest a school district’s decision to remove the bible from elementary and middle school libraries, the Associated Press reported.
Earlier this month, a Utah school district committee designed to flag books that contain sexual content determined that the Bible would be allowed in high school libraries but not in elementary and middle school libraries within the district after someone objected to the book’s contents. When asked by KSL.com if the anonymous challenge to the Bible, which was originally brought in December of 2022, was a serious attempt to have the Bible removed or just an activist taking advantage of the district’s policy to make a statement, Davis School District director of communication Christopher Williams said district officials treat all challenges the same.
Williams said the district decided to only make the book available to high schoolers “based on age appropriateness due to vulgarity or violence.”
Protesters this Wednesday held signs reading, “The Bible is the original textbook” and “Remove porn, not the Bible,” with one parent saying that districts should definitely remove books with problematic material, but the Bible should be exempt.
“We love the Bible. We love God. And we need God in our nation,” Karlee Vincent said.
Last year, the Utah Legislature approved a bill that conservatives said would weed out pornographic material from K-12 libraries and classrooms. The Bible is known to contain graphic violence and sexual content, such as murder, incest, beheadings, sexual violence and genocide.
As the AP points out, the anonymous challenge to the Bible was likely a protest move by someone looking to expose the perceived hypocrisy of laws that police the content of school books.
“The Bible removal is the highest-profile effort to remove a book from a school in Utah since the Legislature passed a law requiring school districts to create new pathways for residents to challenge ‘sensitive materials’ and used a statute-based definition on pornography to define them,” the AP’s report stated.
