The Freedom from Religion Foundation, which describes itself as a nontheistic nonprofit, is giving Leon County School District an ultimatum: Ban the Bible or stop banning books altogether.
In an email sent to school board members on July 14, the Freedom from Religion Foundation piled onto a recent successful effort by the local chapter of the conservative group Moms for Liberty to pull five books found in Leon County high schools.
The next school board meeting will be 2 p.m. July 24 to discuss the first official book challenge hearing of “I am Billie Jean King” by Brad Meltzer.
“We are disturbed that the district has chosen to start removing books from school libraries based on content taken out of context at the request of extremist groups like Moms for Liberty,” foundation Staff Attorney Christopher Line said in the published email to the district.
Freedom from Religion says the Bible should be banned based on the same reasoning Moms for Liberty presented in their request; “sexually explicit content.”
“We write to request that the District either ban the bible based on the criterion of ‘sexually explicit content’ it has used to ban these books, or cease banning books and return the banned books to school shelves,” Line wrote in the email.
This is not a violation of their constitutional rights though… This is just a ban on copies of certain books from being in the school library. They want the bible included in that.
This is not saying a student who owns their own private copy of say, the bible, cannot bring their own copy to school and read it. Is only banning the library from carrying a copy.
No one’s constitutional rights are being violated.
And it’s been almost 20 years since I was in a US public school, but as I understood it back then, the public schools could not carry copies of the bible even if they wanted too.