So, some concerned parents in Gwinnett County, Georgia are try to get Harry Potter taken out of school libraries. Sigh. It’s like they really want us to think of it as Jesusland….
Laura Mallory of Loganville filed an appeal last week to get the best-selling book series out of the schools’ media centers. She is an evangelical Christian who has three children at J.C. Magill Elementary School.
“I think the anti-Christian bias — it’s just got to stop,” Mallory said. “And if we don’t say something, we’ll just keep getting pushed out of the schools. And I pay taxes, too, and I think that gives me a voice to speak out about this.”
OK, so apparently there’s an anti-Christian bias in the schools, and this has something to do with Harry Potter? We really need to call a moratorium on the crazy Christians saying that people not kowtowing to their beliefs are making them victims of some kind of bias. (See the whole ‘suing for the right to be intolerant‘ thing).
Mallory wrote on her appeal forms that she was objecting to the books because of their “evil themes, witchcraft, demonic activity, murder, evil blood sacrifice, spells and teaching children all of this.”
The mother of four said she was opposed to the messages of the books, which describe a young wizard’s adventures in a school of magic. She said she had done much of her research online, reading a variety of Christian message boards
In reading her list of complaints, I wonder what I always wonder in this situation. Has she actually read the Bible? There’s witchcraft, demonic activity, murder, blood sacrifice, etc, all through that book. And don’t think those particular examples I’ve linked to as isolated–there’s lots of each of those things in there. And that’s not even talking about the really crazy stuff, or the ridiculously violent punishment stuff.
This part also kills me:
Mallory said she has been contacted by other Christian parents who were concerned about the content of the books. On her complaint form, she suggested they be replaced by C.S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” series or Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind: the Kids” series.
Harry Potter is hardly literature, but damn, it’s head and shoulders above that Left Behind stuff. I actually read one of those books, just so I could make informed fun of it, and it was so bad that I’m surprised my eyes didn’t start bleeding. (If you have a chunk of time I recommend you go over to the archives of Slacktivist’s Left Behind category and read the posts there, starting at the bottom–he’s reading the first book a tiny chunk at a time and commenting on it. I would say it’s much more fun to read than the actual book, but that’s pretty faint praise since hammering tenpenny nails into your forehead is more fun than reading the book. Let’s say instead that reading the stuff at Slacktivist is worth your time.)
(And shouldn’t the library already have the Narnia books?)
Of course Mallory didn’t feel any need to actually read the Harry Potter books before excoriating them, as is apparently the usual practice with morality-driven censors:
She admitted that she has not read the book series partially because “they’re really very long and I have four kids.”
“I’ve put a lot of work into what I’ve studied and read. I think it would be hypocritical for me to read all the books, honestly. I don’t agree with what’s in them.
How does she know? Oh right, she did a lot of ‘studying’ on Christian message boards. Also, reading long books is apparently too hard for people in Jesusland. That probably explains why they never actually read the Bible.
Sigh.
Fortunately, there is no real sign that the school board will actually listen to her–I’m sure we’ll hear about the results later, but it seems like they have a history of not acting on this kind of foolish request.
