SALT LAKE CITY, Ut.—A countywide school district outside of Salt Lake City has voted to reinstate the Holy Bible in elementary and middle schools. The school district, based in Davis County, made national headlines and outraged social conservatives the world over when an anonymous parent lobbied the school board to ban the Holy Bible for being vulgar and obscene.
Shortly after, there was speculation that the Book of Mormon would be banned as well. For the Bible's sake, at least, that fate has been reversed. The initial ban prompted protests at the state capitol building, partly organized by the far-right grassroots group Utah Parents United. Protestors wielded picket signs depicting messages like “Remove porn, not the Holy Bible.” Considering that Utah is dominated by the LDS Church, the Bible and the Book of Mormon are crucial texts to the spiritual communities in these areas. But, in the case of the parent who instigated the Bible ban, the effort was intended as a coutermeasure to attempts around the country to ban books in schools by right-wing pressure groups, challenging that “the Bible ... has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it's pornography by our new definition.”
The Bible has “incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide,” wrote the parent in a petition to the Davis School District board in a filing from December 2022. Citing a new law that was passed by the Utah state legislature in 2022, the parent referred to how the law could classify the Bible as potentially “pornographic or indecent.”
The school district board ruled unanimously to accept a recommendation by a subcommittee to reinstate the book on middle and elementary school library shelves. In a statement to the press, the district cited the Bible’s “serious value for minors which outweighs the violent or vulgar content it contains.” The board was critical of the parents who voted in a majority to recommend a ban on the Bible in the first place. As this reporter mentioned last week, the conservatives have shot themselves in the foot, as did other social conservatives in the state legislature who simply supported the specific book ban measure because these groups saw certain books as “obscene.”
Meanwhile, ironically, the Freedom From Religion Foundation ran a full-page ad June 18 in the Salt Lake Tribune (seen above) that pictured the Bible and the Book of Mormon asking to “Ban These Books.” The foundation’s ad also states that “if the state of Utah and its school boards insist on censoring ‘sensitive’ material in our public schools … they must start with the Bible and Book of Mormon.” The editorial board for the Tribune argued in an op-ed earlier this month that “when a government starts banning books, the inevitable result is that somebody somewhere is going to ban a book you like.”
