Global Courant
In the Bible, Jesus says, “Let the children come to me” – but parents and teachers in Utah have decided it will have to wait until high school.
In the Davis School District, north of Salt Lake City, the 27-book collection of Christian scriptures is stored away for students until they enter high school.
The district has removed the Bible from elementary and high school libraries after receiving a petition to ban the holy book over its descriptions of sex and violence.
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A KJV Bible with palm cross and palm frond against a burlap background. (iStock)
The bible ban isn’t the first of its kind — schools in Utah earlier began removing other books from libraries after a 2022 state law required schools to consider parental input on age-appropriate books.
The Book of Mormon, a sacred text of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is the next sacred book to be judged in the district.
On December 11, the David School District received a parent’s petition to have the Bible removed from schools because, according to the parent, it was a “sex-ridden” book.
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The parent’s petition requesting a revision of the Bible was made available in March 2022 with the parent’s name and address withheld.
In the petition, the anonymous parent appears to be mocking Utah Parents United, a conservative parent coalition that sought to remove inappropriate sexual books from school libraries.
Within the first five months after the law went into effect, parents filed more than 250 complaints requesting certain books be removed from schools.
“Utah Parents United has omitted one of the most sex-ridden books: the Bible. You will no doubt find that the Bible ‘has no serious values for minors’ because it is pornographic under our new definition,” the petition reads.
The Book of Mormon, another testament of Jesus Christ, is a religious text of the Latter Day Saint movement. (Pascal Deloche/Godong/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
This complaint followed the passage of Utah’s “Sensitive Materials in Schools” law that went into effect in May, which “prohibits certain sensitive instructional materials” if they contain “explicit sexual arousal, stimulation, masturbation, intercourse, sodomy, or fondling.”
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“Get this PORN out of our schools,” the parent wrote along with an eight-page list of “offensive” Bible passages. “If the books banned so far are indicative of much lesser offenses, this should be a slam dunk.”
The school district itself did not explain why it banned the Bible, nor did it name which verses were the deciding factor in removing it.
Global Courant
Davis School District has more than 72,000 students in all grade levels.
Lindsay Kornick of Fox News Digital contributed to this report.
Timothy Nerozzi is a writer for Fox News Digital. You can follow him on Twitter @timothynerozzi and email him at [email protected]
