Attached to the request was a lengthy list of biblical passages that the parent believes warrant the Bible’s removal under the letter of the new law. The legislation’s “bright line” standard specifies that a book is considered indecent if it includes explicit sexual arousal, stimulation, masturbation, intercourse, sodomy, or fondling.
According to the procedure for such requests, the Bible will be put under review by a committee.
Rep. Ken Ivory, a state legislator who sponsored the bill to remove indecent material from public schools, referred to the parent’s request to remove the Bible as “antics that drain school resources.”
“There was a purpose to the bill and this kind of stuff, it’s very unfortunate,” Ivory said. “There are any number of studies that directly link sexualization and hyper-sexualization with sexual exploitation and abuse. Certainly, those are things we don’t want in schools.”
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Ivory went on to say that attempting to characterize the Bible as indecent is “a mockery” of the effort to avoid the sexualization of children in public schools, something Ivory thinks “is very sad.”
With regard to the specific passages cited in the request for the Bible’s removal, Nichole Mason, president of Utah Parents United, told The New York Post, “None of the passages from the Bible meet the Bright Line Standard for pornographic content,” adding that “not every reference to sexual activity meets the criteria for removal from a school library.”
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Though books are typically removed from shelves while under review, the Bible remains available at Davis County School District libraries, along with the Book of Mormon, Torah, and Quran.
