In Utah, writing (and satire) is in debate over book bans
Utah public schools are closed during the summer, making their libraries quieter than usual. But the books on their shelves are now the subject of a skirmish – a skirmish unlike many other cultural clashes over education in the United States.
In this case, the titles in question are the Bible and the Book of Mormon.
On Friday, a person filed a complaint with the Davis School District, just north of Salt Lake City, requesting that the Book of Mormon, a religious text for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, be removed from the libraries to delete. Utah is home to the Church’s international headquarters and has the highest concentration of members of that faith in the country.
That request echoed a December request that challenged the King James Version of the Bible, considered sacred by members of the Church and Christians in general. Both complaints followed the passage of state legislation banning “pornographic or indecent” material in public schools. The measure entitled Sensitive materials in schoolswas signed into law in March 2022.
December’s challenge to the Bible, which was reported by The Salt Lake Grandstanddripping with sarcasm.
“I thank the Utah Legislature and Utah Parents United for making this bad faith process so much easier and much more efficient,” wrote the complainant, whose name was redacted in a document shared by The Tribune.
“Now we can all ban books and you don’t even have to read them or be accurate,” the complainant added, pointing out that the Bible contained descriptions of incest, prostitution, rape and infanticide.
Last month, a Davis district committee decided that the Bible should remain available in high school libraries, but not for younger classes. (Since then someone has appealed to keep it in circulation for all students.) Christopher Williams, a spokesman for the Davis School District, did not share details about the newer complaint against the Book of Mormon, but said the district was “ignoring this request.” would treat”. just like any other request.”
Brooke Stephens, Utah Parents United’s curriculum director, who supported the state’s bill, said the complaints against religious texts “try to minimize parents’ real concerns.”
Ms. Stephens has three children in the district and has challenged several books there — not because they contain racially diverse characters or LGBTQ themes, she said, but because they contain sexually explicit content.
She added that the school libraries had several books with adult imagery that went far beyond what is described in the Bible. “Do you know how many other books you’ll have to delete just because of vulgarity and violence,” she said, “if this is your new starting point?”
Battles over library books have led to acrimonious rifts in school districts across the United States, and those rifts have been exacerbated by social media and political campaigning. The battles have often become proxies for broader discussions about issues such as free speech, gender identity and racial inequality.
Utah is not the first state to revise the Bible. Similar complaints have been filed in Texas, Florida and Missouri, it said Education week.
In the United States, the vast majority of books that have generated complaints from or about LGBTQ people or people of color have been a March report of the American Library Association.
It also found that efforts to ban books in 2022 nearly doubled from the previous year.
Conservative groups, including organizations such as Moms for Liberty and Utah Parents United, have pushed for the removal of books or lobbied for new removal policies.
And complaints are increasingly being filed against multiple books at once, while libraries have historically received more complaints about a single title, the American Library Association found. That suggested political campaigns were behind the trend, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
The complaints about religious texts in Utah, she said, were “certainly a kind of advocacy that could encourage both school boards and state legislatures to think more carefully about what they’re doing.”
“It highlights the fact that censorship is not the answer — that every book is vulnerable to censorship,” she added. “And that’s not what we should want in this country.”
Ken Ivory, the Republican state representative who sponsored last year’s bill, told The Tribune in March that the biblical complaint amounted to “antics that deplete the school’s resources.”
But at one rack on Friday, he expressed confidence in the district’s assessment process.
The King James Version of the Bible “is a challenge to read alone for elementary or middle school kids,” he said. “Traditionally, in America, the Bible is best taught and best understood, at home and around the hearth, as a family.”
According to the policy of the Davis School District, which is the state legislation starting last year, parents – as well as students and staff – can request school libraries to remove “sensitive” books or other materials.
A committee, made up of county officials and parents, then reviews the materials to determine whether they could be considered pornographic, indecent, or inappropriate due to violence or vulgarity. This can take weeks or months.
A register of complaints about the neighborhood website lists about a hundred books that have been challenged there since the law was passed. Committees have made decisions on dozens of them, with mixed results: According to the website, some books, such as Sara Gruen’s “Water for Elephants,” were eventually pulled from shelves. Others stayed, including “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold.
Dozens more, including the Book of Mormon, are still under review.