SALT LAKE CITY — Republican lawmakers rallied with more than one hundred Bible-toting parents and children at Utah’s Capitol on Wednesday to protest a school district’s decision to remove the Bible from middle and elementary school libraries in the wake of a GOP-backed “sensitive materials” law passed two years ago.
Concerned parents and children holding signs that read “The Bible is the original textbook” and “Remove porn, not the Bible,” said they were outraged after the Davis School District announced that a review committee concluded the Bible was too “violent or vulgar” for young children. The committee ruled that it did not qualify as obscene or pornographic under the sensitive materials law, but used its own discretion to remove it from libraries below the high school level.
Karlee Vincent, a Davis County mother of three kids carrying children’s Bibles to the demonstration, said districts could weigh banning certain titles with controversial material, but not religious texts like the Bible.
“We love the Bible. We love God. And we need God in our nation,” she said.
The anonymously made challenge to the Bible appears to have been submitted as a statement to undermine the two-year-old law, noting the sacred text contains instances of incest, prostitution and rape. It derided the review procedures as a “bad faith process” and attacked groups that have pushed to remove certain titles from schools, including Parents United and its Utah-based affiliate.
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. It has put a crossroads in front of proponents of scrutinizing materials available in schools. The pushback has also emboldened book-banning critics, who argue anger at removing the Bible illustrates arbitrary and political double standards and the issues inherent to removing books that have certain content.
“If folks are outraged about the Bible being banned, they should be outraged about all the books that are being censored,” Kasey Meehan, who directs the Freedom to Read program at the writers’ organization PEN America, said last week.