Holy Book Banning!
The Michigan town which used a Florida law to ban books in the Bible.
A Michigan city has enacted a book-banning law which puts the Florida bill its based on to shame. It requires libraries to remove any book which makes someone feel uncomfortable. The initial targets were school textbooks which encouraged “recreational” sex, and presented “negative” views of U. S. History. But recently, parents went a whole ‘nother direction, and banned the book of Leviticus in the Bible. Leviticus asserts that anyone who “is a wizard shall surely be put to death.”¹ The parents have kids who dress up in Hogwarts costumes, then walk to friends’ houses for Harry Potter parties. They feared a Christian fundamentalist might use Leviticus to justify a drive-by stoning.
Midland, population ~42,000, is 110 miles northwest of Detroit. It’s a humdrum burg where people attend church every Sunday morning, even though they never do anything on Saturday nights which needs forgiving. Midland is noteworthy for being an island of chemical plants in a sea of cornfields. Outlanders think that’s odd. Midlanders like it just fine. They’ll step out on their stoop on a sunny Spring morning. Take a deep breath of farm-country air. And if a whiff of aminoethylethanolamine crinkles their nose, they just smile and say to themselves “Smells like Dow Chemical’s makin’ money today.”
Like other rural parts of Michigan, Midland is deep-red Republican. But whereas the others are MAGA country, Midlanders are devoted to Governor Ron DeSantis. They love how he uses his powers to beat the Woke out of Florida. They want him to run for President, so he can do the same to America. They’re such spirited supporters, DeSantis traveled to Midland last April 6th² and delivered a speech, which he used to denounce “woke agendas,” and encourage the banning of books which further them.
To the Midland Republicans, DeSantis’s speech was a call to arms. The City Council passed a book-banning law the next day. It’s based on Florida House Bill 1069, which requires schools to remove a book if even one parent complains about it.³ But like the cattle grazing in the fields outside of town, Midland’s law does book-banning on steroids. It allows not just parents, but anyone to ban a book. And bans apply to every library in town: the Grace A. Dow Memorial Library; Northwood University’s Strosacker Library; K-12 public and private school libraries; church libraries; and the Little Free Libraries on posts in people’s front yards.
The initial bans were just what one would expect.
- Assault rifle owners got libraries to remove All American Massacre by Eric Madfis and Adam Lankford. They worried the book might cause their AR-15s to feel guilt for being the weapon of choice in mass shootings.
- QAnoners made libraries block access from their terminals to the Snopes fact-checking web site. They’re upset because Snopes undermines their efforts to teach their kids the facts of life. Such as that Chelsea Clinton forces American children to get the Covid vaccine. The Mars company puts semen in M&M’S®. And at a rally for Trump, women protesters screamed at him through their vaginas.⁴
- Republicans forced libraries to rip the First Amendment out of the United States Constitution. That’s the one which says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” The Republicans don’t like the First Amendment because it denies them the freedom to deny other people the freedom to do things Republicans don’t like.
The next set of bans weren’t anticipated. Even so, they were legitimate uses of the law.
- A group of parents made libraries remove books which describe slavery as practiced in the South before the Civil War. They asserted that the books don’t offer a fair and balanced view: they describe slavery’s cruelties, but not its benefits.
- Another group forced the removal of books which describe racial discrimination, such as in regards to employment, education, housing, criminal justice, and voting rights. They argued that Black Americans have nothing to complain about. As Senator Lindsey Graham put it, Black people got “a two-term African-American president. And the [current] vice president is African-American-Indian.”⁵
- A dozen parents demanded that books on the Holocaust be banned. Not because the subject matter is upsetting. It was because the parents are Holocaust deniers; they believe the Holocaust never happened.⁶
- Finally, the local chapter of the DeSantis DeManiacs fan club demanded that A History of Toilet Paper by Sophia Gholz and Xiana Teimoy be banned. It has to do with the fact that, before wiping their heinie, people either fold or wad their TP. The book says wadding is wiser. Even so, the DeManiacs are folders. That’s because they think wadding is woke.
Initially, book-banning plodded along in fits and starts. But it took off when people realized something. When it comes to books which cause guilt, anguish, and distress, nothing beats the Bible.
The Good Book is actually a collection of sixty-six books. Many of them offer knowledge, insights, perspective, wisdom, courage, comfort, and healing. However, some of them encourage ignorance, denial, bigotry, paranoia, cruelty, oppression, and violence.
Even the gentlest books can cause harm. They tell people to perform arcane rituals. Follow out-of-date rules. Do what doesn’t come naturally. And every goal is a “stretch goal.” True, when a person can’t measure up, the Bible speaks of “forgiveness.” But the fact is, there’s no such thing as a Christian misdemeanor. No one ever gets off with a warning. Never mind the Commandments; break just a proverb, and you’ve committed a felony.
Some Christians acknowledge the root of the problem: God sets goals which aren’t SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.⁷ In so doing, God sets people up to fail. When they do, they’re apt to feel wicked, weak, flawed, contemptible, irredeemable, miserable, and damned.
Fortunately, Midland’s book-banning law gives Christians the means to ditch the most distressing books in the Bible.
The first people to take advantage of this opportunity were Lutheran wives at churches affiliated with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. WELS churches give husbands the means to make women abide by eighteenth century rules. They preach that “the husband is the head of the wife.”⁸ A church must “suffer not a woman to usurp authority over the man.”⁹ Indeed, “women [should] keep silence. If they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands.”¹⁰
Lutheran wives put up with that Biblical balderdash for centuries. No more. Now they had a way to cut the theological legs out from under Lutheran men who use scriptures to sanctify their sexism. The wives invoked Midland’s law to rip the related books — Ephesians, 1st Timothy, and 1st Corinthians — out of all Bibles in the city. If a Lutheran husband tried to pull that “headship” crap after that, their ass was grass, and their wife was the lawnmower.
Lutheran men might have fought this, only they were solving a problem of their own. Per Deuteronomy 23:1, “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.” You heard right: a guy can’t go to church if he don’t have a package. Not even if, like the IBM punch cards of old, it’s just folded, spindled, or mutilated.
This was a serious problem for Lutheran farmers. Most guys couldn’t get through a harvest without getting their peters caught in the potato peeler, corn shucker, apple corer, turnip chopper, or hay baler. A man might snag it with his bagging hook. Or chafe it in his burr mill. One moment, a guy is canning tomatoes. The next, his pud is stuck in the canning funnel. Or worse: a man might look at a shelf of just-canned fruits, and see his wang staring back at him from inside a Mason jar of sliced peaches.
Fortunately, Lutheran men were allowed back in the pews after they invoked the book-banning law to get rid of Deuteronomy. Their pastors were glad they did. It relieved them of having to fish around in men’s skivvies before letting them in the sanctuary.
White Evangelicals banned 1st Peter, because it urges Christians to have “compassion [for] one another, love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous”.¹¹ Also 2nd Timothy, which tells them to “follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace. Be gentle to all men.”¹² And Proverbs, which says “Better it is to be of an humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide the spoil with the proud.”¹³ Each book has the same problem: its preachings are contrary to the gospel according to Trump.
Oh, and the Evangelicals added James to their basket of banned books. It was because James wants them to “respect [people] that weareth the gay clothing.”¹⁴
The Catholics banned three books.
- James, because it declares that “Even though the tongue is a little member, behold how great a fire kindleth!”¹⁵
- Proverbs, which observes that “The mouth of women is a deep pit: he that is abhorred of the Lord shall fall therein.”¹⁶
- Mark, which requires that “if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell.”¹⁷
After that, men and women could slurp the gherkin, eat the peach, pet the kitty, and celebrate Palm Sunday without going to Hell.
Finally, the blue-haired Presbyterian church-ladies raised a concern about the book of Matthew. Specifically, the verse that goes “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed sin with her already in his heart”¹⁸ The church-ladies didn’t want Matthew banned. They just wanted something added. “But seeing as thou hast a sin in mind, maketh the woman an offer and see if she’ll go for it.”
[1]: “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones.” The Holy Bible, Leviticus, chapter 20, verse 27.
[2]: “DeSantis condemns DEI, ‘woke’ education at Dave Camp Spring Breakfast in Midland”, Midland Daily News, https://www.ourmidland.com/news/article/desantis-speaks-dave-camp-spring-breakfast-midland-17882201.php
[3]: “Florida at Center of Debate as School Book Bans Surge Nationally”, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/22/books/book-ban-florida.html#:~:text=In March
[4]: Snopes, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/
[5]: “Lindsey Graham Says There’s ‘No’ Systemic Racism In U.S., Citing Kamala Harris As VP”, Huffpost, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lindsey-graham-no-systemic-racism_n_60856dece4b003896e052dc6
[6]: “Holocaust denial”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial
[7]: “SMART Goals”, Corporate Finance Institute, https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/management/smart-goal/
[8]: Ephesians, chapter 5, verse 23, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Ephesians-5-23/
[9]: 1st Timothy, chapter 2, verse 12, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/1-Timothy-2-12/
[10]: 1st Corinthians, chapter 14, verses 34 and 35, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/1-Corinthians-Chapter-14/
[11]: 1st Peter, chapter 3, verse 8, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/1-Peter-3-8/
[12]: 2nd Timothy, chapter 2, verses 22 and 24, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/2-Timothy-Chapter-2/
[13]: Proverbs, chapter 16, verse 19, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Proverbs-16-19/
[14]: James, chapter 2, verse 3, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/James-2-3/
[15]: James, chapter 3, verse 5, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/James-3-5/
[16]: Proverbs, chapter 22, verse 14, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Proverbs-22-14/
[17]: Mark, chapter 9, verse 43, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Mark-9-43/
[18]: Matthew, chapter 5, verse 28, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Matthew-5-28/
