Utah School District Reverses Bible Ban After Appeals and Protests

The Bible is read aloud at the Utah Capitol on Nov. 25, 2013. (Steve Griffin/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP)

A school district in Utah has reversed an earlier committee-based decision that removed the King James Version of the Bible from bookshelves of elementary and middle school libraries.

The Davis School District—a public system with about 72,000 students—largely pulled the Bible from elementary and middle school bookshelves on May 22 after a frustrated parent convinced a review committee the book contained “vulgar” or “violent” content for younger children.

At a board meeting on June 20, committee officials said the district had determined the sacred text was age-appropriate for all district libraries. In allowing the Bible to be accessible to students regardless of their grade level, the board sided with 70 people who filed appeals after it was banned last month.

“The appeal committee reviewed all relevant information pertaining to the original committee’s determination, as well as all information pertaining to appeal requests and public comments. The appeal committee determined that the Bible does not contain material which violates ‘bright line rule,’” the school district said in a statement.

“It then considered [the] age appropriateness of the Bible using the standards outlined in law/policy. Based on its assessment of community standards, the appeal committee determined that the Bible has significant, serious value for minors which outweighs the violent or vulgar content it contains,” it continued. “Therefore, the appeal committee considers the Bible to be age appropriate and recommended that it be retained in school libraries at all levels.”

Members of the school board voted unanimously in a public meeting on Tuesday to return the Good Book to libraries in the northern Utah school district, the statement reads.

The reversal is the latest development in the debate over a Utah law—known as HB 374 or the “sensitive material” law—which allows parents to challenge “sensitive materials” available to children in public schools. The purpose of the bill was “to remove pornographic, inappropriate material from K–12 libraries and classrooms.”

How It Started

Chris Williams, the communication director for the Davis School District, told The Epoch Times that a parent sent a request on Dec. 11, 2022, that the Bible should “face the same review process under the same district’s policy as all other books.”

The parent—whose identity is redacted—sent an eight-page list of sexual references in various chapters and verses of the Bible containing such things as incest, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, and rape.

Williams believes the parent’s frustration was a protest against the “sensitive material” bill passed in 2021 that is now being enforced in all of the school districts in Utah. Some people are calling HB374 a “book-banning bill.”

“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 in a complaint reviewed by NBC News. “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!”

Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory, a Republican who sponsored and authored the bill, told The Epoch Times: “HB374 is not a book-banning bill. It merely addresses age appropriateness, requiring that all instructional materials in all school settings be age appropriate and not contain obscene and indecent materials.”

Williams said the parent’s Dec. 11, 2022, request to ban the Bible was sent to one of the review committees. The committee examined the selected passages mentioned in the parent’s complaint, and after several months of deliberation, the committee made its decision and banned the Bible from all libraries and classrooms in elementary and middle schools in the Davis County district.

However, the committee members did not believe it qualified as obscene or pornographic under the sensitive materials law or state obscenity laws, so at their own discretion, they allowed it to stay in high school libraries and classrooms. As per the Utah State Code, indecent content includes explicit sexual arousal, stimulation, masturbation, intercourse, sodomy, or fondling, according to Justia.

Community Responds

Williams said that there was an appeal on May 31 by a parent (who also wants to remain anonymous) “who would like the Bible retained at all levels.” The school district also revealed in Tuesday’s statement that there were a number of appeals filed “within days” after the committee decided to ban the Bible.

Additionally, over 100 people held a rally at the Utah State Capitol on June 7  to protest the committee’s decision. People at the rally and elsewhere expressed disapproval of the banning of the Bible.

Brad Probst, a former candidate for the Utah State Senate and a resident of Salt Lake City, told The Epoch Times, “This country is in big trouble when a school district would ban the Bible but allow all sorts of other perverse books into the classroom that are so detrimental to our young people.”

Jacey Davis, a mother of five and a local resident of Farmington in Davis County, told The Epoch Times that she wonders if this problem could be settled better by enforcing local obscenity laws that each community already has in place, which make it “illegal for anyone to create or view obscene or pornographic material on school property.”

“The Bible is far from the category of obscene. While the Bible does have some stories telling of inappropriate things happening, they are a warning and lesson for us not to do such things, whereas true indecent, obscene, or pornographic materials are promoting those things,” Davis said. “I am disappointed by attempts to censor the Bible by people, especially in the state of Utah, which was founded on the principles of religious liberty.”

In statehouses from Florida to Arkansas, Republicans have enacted laws that expand parents’ power to challenge what is available in schools and libraries and, in some places, subject librarians to criminal penalties for providing materials deemed harmful to minors. The legislative effort is one prong of a growing push to ban certain titles; the number of attempts to ban or restrict books across the United States in 2022 was the highest in 20 years, according to the American Library Association.

The Associated Press and Orlean Koehle contributed to this report.

From NTD News