A school district in the US state of Utah has banned the King James Version of the Bible from its elementary and middle schools libraries for containing “vulgarity or violence”. High school students can continue to access the Bible in their libraries. Also, since only the King James Version (a popular version published in 1611) was challenged, other translations of the Bible are not covered by the ban, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. However, the Davis school district, which serves around 72,000 students, is already receiving requests to ban more religious texts — on Friday (June 2), it said it was looking into a complaint against the Book of Mormon, the foundational text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a prominent sect in Utah. Why was the Bible banned? Last year, Utah passed a law that bans “pornographic or indecent” books from schools. This law came after conservative parents opposed books around sexual and racial identity in schools, and has been used to ban works like Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Maia Kobabe's graphic memoir Gender Queer, and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is told from the viewpoint of a Native American teenager. The request to ban the Bible was made by a parent “frustrated with book challenges and bans in their school district”, NPR reported. The identity of the parent has not been revealed. “You’ll no doubt find that the Bible, under Utah Code Ann. § 76-10-1227, has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition,” the parent said in the complaint. The review committee to look into such complaints consists of teachers, parents and administrators. The District spokesperson, Chris Williams, was quoted by AP as saying that the district “doesn’t differentiate between requests to review books and doesn’t consider whether complaints may be submitted as satire”. The ban has been appealed by another parent. What is this Utah law? Under the law, something is deemed indecent “if it includes explicit sexual arousal, stimulation, masturbation, intercourse, sodomy or fondling”, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. The contentious material does not have to be “taken as a whole”, and a mere presence of such acts is enough for the ban. The law was written by Utah Republican legislator Ken Ivory. When the challenge to the Bible was first made public in March, Ivory had called it “unfortunate” and a “mockery”. However, after the ban was ordered earlier this week, he changed his stance, saying, “The KJV [King James Version] Bible is a challenging read for elementary or middle school children on their own. Traditionally, in America, the Bible is best taught, and best understood, in the home, and around the hearth, as a family.” In the statement posted on Facebook, he called upon “all school districts, school board members, and school officials to immediately and thoroughly review and make a publicly available determination of the age appropriateness of all instructional materials in K-12 schools throughout the State.” Ivory also said the Davis school district has “now set the floor for the standard by which age appropriate, sensitive, obscene, and indecent materials must immediately be reviewed”. “We are always grateful for board members and school officials who put first the safety of our children, over allowing the sexualization of the school setting” Ivory said, “especially in a compulsory education system where parents must be able to trust that their children are not exposed to age inappropriate, harmful, obscene or indecent materials.”
