The good man of the Obelix often repeated that “these Romans are crazy”. This character, an inseparable friend of Asterix, both born from the creativity of screenwriter René Goscinny and cartoonist Albert Uderzo, would travel today to the United States, to the new world, far from Gaul, and would say that “they are these Americans are crazy”.

As long as they didn’t cancel it, or rather, precisely because of that.

The banning of books, including those written by a Nobel laureate such as Toni Morrison ( Beloved ) or a popularly successful author such as Margaret Atwood ( The Handmaid’s Tale ) has become a fever in conservative states. The list is long. There is a real illiteracy pandemic.

Any page that gives off aromas of topics such as slavery or racism, gender violence and gender itself, sexual orientation or the questioning of masculinity, all these and more are under threat of ban, lest children and young people feel guilty or perverted according to the fundamentalist canon of exclusionary morality.

Except for an issue like the bloody scourge of weapons, a love fostered from childhood, which is part of their idiosyncrasy, their genetic code, nothing and no one is safe. Not even God.

Censorship goes so far that a school district in Salt Lake City, the capital of Utah, ordered that elementary and middle school students cannot access the Bible, which is the holy book for Christians in general. After receiving a complaint from 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 it will only be allowed to circulate among students appropriate for their older age,” the district justified, without specifying the dangerous passages.

Since this measure comes from Utah, the state with the largest Mormon colony and home to the Vatican equivalent of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (official denomination), one would think that it is about a war of religions.

Well, that’s not the case. Intolerance does not discriminate. The Davis School District received a request Friday that the Book of Mormon, its personal Bible, also be placed on hold for schoolchildren. In his narrative, argued the detractors, there are ingredients with a traumatic capacity, since “battles, beheadings or kidnappings” appear.

“We will treat this claim like any other we have received and we will follow the same regulation,” the district’s director of communications, Christopher William, told CNN.

The two claims came after the state legislature passed a proposal to ban “pornographic or indecent” material in public school settings, such as their libraries.

This regulation, according to its wording, “prohibits certain sensitive materials” and requires those responsible for school education, including parents, to participate in determining whether an instructional material has this sensitive status.

As the Salt Lake Tribune reported, the parent who filed the complaint against the Bible argued that this holy book does not have serious values ​​for minors because it is pornographic according to the definition established in the new law.

The claimant thanked the Utah Legislature and United Parents “for making this bad faith process much easier and much different.” In the official complaint (in which the name was withheld), this person added that “now we can ban all books and we don’t need to read them or be specific about it.” It must be that all this has the echo of a gloomy time in Europe of the 20th century.