Good old Obelix often repeated that “these Romans are crazy.” This character, an inseparable friend of Asterix, both arising from the creativity of screenwriter René Goscinny and cartoonist Albert Uderzo, would travel to the United States today, to the new world, far from Gaul, and say that “these Americans are crazy.”
As long as they didn’t cancel it or, rather, precisely because of that.
The ban on books, including those written by a Nobel laureate like Toni Morrison (Beloved) or a popular best-selling author like Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) has become a fever in conservative states. The list is long. There is a true illiterate pandemic.
Any page that gives off aromas of topics such as slavery or racism, gender violence and gender itself, sexual orientation or questioning of masculinity, all of this, and more, is under threat of a ban lest the children and young people feel guilty or become perverted according to the fundamentalist canon of exclusive morality.
Except for a matter like the bloody scourge of weapons, love fostered since childhood, which is part of its idiosyncrasy, of its genetic code, nothing and no one is safe. Not even God.
The censorship goes to such an extent that a school district in Salt Lake City, the capital of Utah, ordered that elementary and secondary students cannot access the Bible, which is the holy book for Christians in general. After a complaint was received from some parents a few months ago, the veto decision, which excludes high school students, was taken a few days ago and is justified because the Bible “contains vulgarity and violence.”
The complaint specified that the story describes scenes of incest, prostitution, rape and infanticide.
“The committee agreed to keep this book in the library, but its circulation will only be allowed among students appropriate for their age,” the district justified, without specifying the dangerous passages.
Since this measure comes from Utah, the state in which the largest Mormon colony resides, where the Vatican’s equivalent of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (official denomination) is located, one would think that it is a religious war.
Well, that’s not the case. Intolerance does not discriminate. The Davis school district received a petition Friday that the Book of Mormon, its private Bible, also be placed under arrest for school children. In his narrative, the detractors argued, there are ingredients with a traumatic capacity, since “battles, beheadings or kidnappings” appear.
“We will treat this complaint like any other we have received and we will follow the same regulation,” the district’s director of communication, Christopher William, told CNN.
The two claims come after the state legislature approved a proposal to ban “pornographic or indecent” items in public school settings, such as their libraries. Republican Governor Spencer Cox signed the law into law in March 2022.
This regulation, according to its wording, “prohibits certain sensitive materials” and requires that those responsible for school education, including parents, participate in determining whether an instructional material has that sensitive status.
As the Salt Lake Tribune advanced, the father or mother who filed the complaint against the Bible maintained that this sacred book has no serious value for minors because it is pornographic according to the definition established in the new law.
The complainant thanked the Utah legislature and the Padres Unidos Organization “for making this bad faith process much easier and much more different.” In the official complaint (in which his name was withheld), this person added that “now we can ban all books and we don’t need to read them or be precise about it.” It will be that all this has the echo of a gloomy time in the Europe of the 20th century.
