A Utah school district has banned the Bible for elementary and middle school students after it was determined to be ‘too vulgar’ and ‘too violent’ for younger readers.
According to Daily Mail, the move came after a parent in the district grew frustrated by other efforts to ban books in schools.
Officials in the Davis district, a 72,000-student district north of Salt Lake City removed the religious text from elementary and middle schools but will keep it in high schools.
A committee with the district reviewed The Good Book after a complaint by a parent, and district officials say the committee is made up of parents, teachers, and administrators.
There was also a complaint to remove the Book of Mormon from younger students’ libraries.
Chris Williams, a district spokesman, said that a review request for the Book of Mormon had been submitted, but he declined to disclose the reasons. He also declined to confirm whether it came from the same person who had complained about the Bible, citing a school board privacy regulation.
Williams claimed that the district doesn’t distinguish between requests for book reviews and doesn’t take complaints made as satire into account. A group made up of educators from the predominately conservative community—administrators, parents, and teachers—takes care of the reviews.
Following a 2022 state rule requiring schools to engage parents in choices over what constitutes “sensitive material,” the district has deleted additional books, including Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” and John Green’s “Looking for Alaska.”
The committee did not explain its reasoning or specify which Scripture passages it judged to be particularly violent or vulgar when it published its conclusion regarding the Bible in an online database of review requests.
The choice was made as conservative parent activists, especially state-based Parents United chapters, invade school boards and statehouses around the US, raising concerns about how sex and violence are discussed in classrooms.
It is unknown who asked for the Bible to be prohibited from Davis schools or if they are associated with any bigger group due to the district’s privacy policy.
The parent highlighted that the Bible contains incidents of rape, prostitution, and incest, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune through a public records request. According to the complaint, the district was “ceding our children’s education, First Amendment Rights, and library access” to Parents United through a “bad faith process.”
‘Utah Parents United left off one of the most sex-ridden books around: The Bible,’ the parent´s complaint, dated Dec. 11, said. It later went on to add, ‘You´ll no doubt find that the Bible (under state law) has `no serious values for minors´ because it´s pornographic by our new definition.’
The review committee determined the Bible didn´t qualify under Utah’s definition of what’s pornographic or indecent, which is why it remains in high schools, Williams said. The committee can make its own decisions under the new 2022 state law and has applied different standards based on students´ ages in response to multiple challenges, he said.