A parent is arguing that if banned books like 'Gender Queer' are pulled from shelves, the Bible—with its sex scenes, incest, and murder—should be banned, too.

By: Samantha Cole

A Utah parent has filed a request to ban God’s most popular blog, the Bible, from schools, citing and ridiculing a law passed last year that removed dozens of books from schools and libraries last year. “Get this PORN out of our schools!” they wrote in their request for the removal of the book.

In 2022, Utah passed a law banning books with “pornographic or indecent” content. The initial list of banned books included many titles that feature coming-of-age stories that also deal with themes of sexuality and gender, including Judy Blume’s Forever..., Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, and Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult.

By those standards, the parent—whose personal information was redacted by the Davis School District for privacy reasons—is arguing that the Bible should be on the list.

“Incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide,” the parent wrote in their request, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, which obtained a copy of the request. “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 Bible absolutely contains all of this and more. A personal NSFW favorite is Song of Solomon, a rapturous piece of erotica, describing a woman’s breasts in painfully horny detail as “two fawns” and “clusters of fruit,” and pleas for a man to eat the “precious fruits” of her “garden.” King David is overcome with lust for a woman named Bathsheba, who he’s been creeping on while she bathes, and commits adultery with her, later murdering her husband. Samson’s downfall is a femdom named Delilah. Noah’s son Ham catches his dad nude and drunk off his ass, and accidentally sees his dick; for this, Noah curses Ham’s bloodline to lives of slavery. Lot’s daughters get him drunk and rape him repeatedly while he’s blacked out. There are more references to, and encouragement of, killing babies in violent ways than I care to name but feel free to search that up. God gets really pissed at the citizens of Judah for smelting all the jewelry he gave them down into fucktoys.

“I thank the Utah Legislature and Utah Parents United for making this bad faith process so much easier and way more efficient,” the parent wrote. Utah Parents United is one of several conservative groups pushing for more bans on books in schools, which overwhelmingly feature Black people, people of color, and queer or gender-nonconforming characters. “Now we can all ban books and you don’t even need to read them or be accurate about it. Heck, you don’t even need to see the book! Ceding our children’s education, First Amendment Rights, and library access to a white supremacist hate group like Utah Parents United seems like a wonderful idea for a school district literally under investigation for being racist.”

Utah is one of several states where libraries and teachers are undergoing attacks from right-wing groups and conservative parents who are demanding that libraries ban large swaths of books. In Florida, teachers risk going to jail if they don’t cover or remove books until they’re reviewed for “offensive” content.

Parents can submit books for review by the school district, and there’s a backlog of books under review, which takes as long as 60 days, Davis School District spokesperson Christopher Williams told the Salt Lake Tribune. “We don’t differentiate between one request and another. We see that as the work that we do,” Williams said.

In 2021, the Department of Justice and the United States Attorney’s Office for Utah investigated the district for race discrimination in the district’s schools, “including serious and widespread racial harassment of Black and Asian-American students,” according to a press release announcing the settlement. In 2022, the mother of a Black ninth grader sued the school district for "racial harassment by students on a daily basis.”