A recent letter from the atheist group Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) to Ryan Walters, the state’s superintendent of public instruction in Oklahoma, demanded that he ban the Bible from the shelves of the libraries of the state’s public schools. The letter is a response to recent remarks by Walters, who called for the removal from public school libraries of 190 books that promote the LGBTQ+ agenda.
Walters said the books were “graphic pornography,” harmful to students. “When it comes to our schools, do we want the radical ideology in our classroom that pushes gender theory, that pushes graphic pornography in order to perform a social experiment on our kids?”
He added, “Or, do we want the Constitution? Do we want documents like the Federalist Papers and the Bible, so that our kids understand our history and how our government was put together — those core fundamental principles [that] have made us the greatest country in the history of the world?”
In its letter, the FFRF describes itself as an organization whose purpose is to protect the constitutional principle of separation of state and church, but it also pushes legalized abortion and the transgender youth movement. It is clearly hostile to Christianity, as it has a warning label about the Bible that it encourages members to put on hotel Bibles — “WARNING: LITERAL BELIEF IN THIS BOOK MAY ENDANGER YOUR HEALTH AND LIFE.”
The letter to Walters is very critical of the Bible, arguing that it depicts rape and sexual activity. It characterizes the story of the destruction of Sodom as “genocide … by a pyromaniacal god,” and asserts that there are “nearly 150 Bible verses displaying a pornographic view of sex and women, lewdness, depravity and sexual violence often ordered or countenanced by the biblical deity.” The letter also cites an anti-Christian book, written by FFRF co-president Dan Barker, that accuses God of “racism, sexism, slavemongering and sadomasochism.”
There is even a reference to another author who said, “There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.” (Actually, religion did not “rule the world” during the Dark Ages, which lasted only a few hundred years in the early part of the Middle Ages.)
In an FFRF news release, the other co-president of FFRF, Annie Laurie Gaylor, said Walters’ claim that the Bible is a foundational document for America is “ignorant,” insisting that the U.S. Constitution makes no reference to a deity.
But, the Constitution does reference a deity. The Constitution itself states that it was agreed to by the delegates “in the year of our Lord 1787,” which is, of course, a reference to Jesus Christ, regarded by Christians as a deity.
Walters responded to the letter, saying that he had a hard time taking seriously “any atheist group” that attempts to compare books like Gender Queer to the Bible. “George Washington and Thomas Jefferson didn’t reference ‘Gender Queer’ when drafting any of our founding documents.”
While it is true that the federal government is prohibited from establishing a national religion, the words “separation of church and state” do not actually appear anywhere in the Constitution. Those words are simply an interpretation of what James Madison meant when he wrote the First Amendment prohibition of an established religion.
The words come from a letter that President Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut. The Baptists were concerned about a rumor they had heard that Congress was going to make the Congregationalists the national religion, and Jefferson assured them that could not happen, as the First Amendment had erected a “wall of separation between church and state.” This would, Jefferson explained, prevent the government from interfering in the affairs of the churches.
After Jefferson wrote the letter, he went up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, and attended church services.
As there were few buildings yet erected in the federal district (wouldn’t that be nice today?), churches used the Capitol on Sundays (Congress did not conduct business on the day when churches held services, and the Constitution itself does not consider Sunday a presidential work day). Jefferson did not consider such usage of a public building a violation of the First Amendment, but it is a good guess that FFRF would.
Insofar as the Bible being a book that supports vile practices such as bestiality, the FFRF fails to distinguish between description and prescription. The Bible describes many horrible things that actually happened, but that does not mean that it is condoning those actions. Unlike the books of other religions, the Bible includes failures of its heroes — Moses, David, and Paul were all guilty of murder, or, in the case of Paul, at least supportive of it. The Bible does not condone their actions, but it does describe sin committed by its greatest heroes. This is because the Bible teaches that all human beings have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
Except one, of course.
This is an important difference between the Bible and the books that Walters thinks are inappropriate for little schoolchildren. The books that Walters is concerned about promote obscenity and deviant behavior — the Bible does not. And Walters is not advocating removing books from public libraries, bookstores, or private homes, just taxpayer-supported school libraries for, say, first- and second-graders.
In our society, the radical Left is all for censorship of conservative and Christian views from classrooms, social media, and public-school libraries. Go visit school libraries in your community and compare how many “conservative” books there are with “liberal” books. Many left-leaning librarians routinely keep books with conservative themes off the shelves. Speakers that oppose the leftist creed are kept off college campuses, sometimes with violence. And statues they don’t like get torn down.
So much for leftist “tolerance.”
