Book banning has come back to bite US conservatives

If you thought American book-banning couldn’t get any more ridiculous, think again. A school district in Utah, one of the most religious states in the country, has banned the Bible. 

The Bible – fundamental to the state’s Protestant, Catholic and Mormon churches – is to be removed from elementary and middle school libraries for containing ‘vulgarity or violence’. The authorities for the school district of Davis County, just north of Salt Lake City, upheld a parental complaint that the Bible contained ‘incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide’. The parent, who attached an eight-page list of verses unsuitable for children, wrote: ‘Get this PORN out of our schools.’

The request – which appears to be liberal retaliation for right-wing censorship – comes a year after Utah passed a state law prohibiting books with ‘pornographic or indecent’ content from Utah schools. Until now, the restricted works have mainly been LGBT or race-themed books such as the graphic novel Gender Queer and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

The parent’s apparently pseudo-conservative complaint may be tongue-in-cheek, provocative or hypocritical, but it has been enabled by the state’s censorious lawmakers.