Angered by a law requiring the removal of books with pornographic content from school libraries and classrooms, a parent in the US state has been upset Utah an unexpected request to the panel that judges banned works. He wants to ban the Bible from schools, calling it “one of the sexiest books out there.” The review is being conducted by Davis County, according to a report by The Salt Lake Tribune, a Utah newspaper.
“Incest, masturbation, sodomy, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, rape and even infanticide,” the father writes in his application, to which he attaches eight pages of the Bible with passages that he considers inappropriate. “You will no doubt find that the Bible has no ‘serious ancillary values’ under the Utah Code because it is pornographic by our new definition.”
A spokesman for the school district told the Tribune that the parents’ application was being reviewed. “We don’t differentiate between one request and the other,” he assures. “We consider it our work.” The review period is 60 days. In this case there was a delay because “more and more parents are questioning the books”. The order was placed on December 11th.
Passed in 2022, the state law received significant support from Utah Parents United, a conservative parenting group that has largely focused on language relating to the LGBT+ community. The law states that a book is inappropriate if it contains content about “explicit sexual arousal, stimulation, masturbation, intercourse, bestiality, or fondling.” Books already surveyed by the group include Gender Queer, a comic book about the author’s journey to selfidentity.
The parent who filed the request claimed Utah Parents United is “a white supremacist hate group” and that the Davis District is under investigation for racism. According to the Tribune, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded in 2021 that the district had deliberately ignored years of “serious and widespread” racial harassment in its schools.
Utah Parents United told the newspaper that the group “believes in following the law.” “That’s all we’re asking schools to do.”
“The request is a joke,” says the deputy, coauthor of the law
Republican Congressman Ken Ivory, one of the authors of the bill to remove pornographic books from school libraries, called the requirement to remove the Bible “antics that drain school resources” and viewed it as a political coup, not a serious demand. He added, “It’s very sad that people downplay it and make fun of it.”
“The bill had a purpose and stuff like that, that’s very unfortunate,” he said. “There are several studies that directly link sexualization and hypersexualization to sexual exploitation and abuse. These are certainly things that we do not want in schools.”
According to the MP, the intention has always been to limit books based on the appropriate age for children in schools. “If parents still want their child to read a particular book, they can buy it from Amazon or a bookstore, or even look it up at their public library,” Ivory noted.