Moms for Liberty get a taste of their own medicine with request to ban Bible in PBC schools

Editor's note: This story was originally published in July 2023.

The Palm Beach County School Board is weighing whether to ban the Bible as suitable school library reading material.

Something like this was bound to happen. In the current rush to ferret out “sexual conduct” in books, a group of militant non-readers hilariously calling themselves the Moms for Liberty have waged a battle against all things sexual emanating from the printed page.

Their hunt for smut, though, has a glaring blind spot for the Bible which, in places, seems like a giant compendium of sex tales, or maybe The Real Concubines of Gomorrah.

For example, the word “seed” pops up 335 times in the Bible — and an overflowing number of these mentions have nothing to do with the planting of crops.

There’s one especially smutty Bible story about a guy named Onan who is told by his father to marry his dead brother’s wife. (The Bible also serves as a manual of awful parenting tips.)

“And Onan knew that the seed should not be his,” the story in Genesis says. ”And it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.”

Onan is put to death for his seed-management practices. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to get from that story, other than the word “onanism”, which has become the fancy word for masturbation.

The Bible’s especially brutal toward women. Much of the sex is non-consensual, and “harlots” get mentioned 57 times in the Bible, including a reference to Samson who saw a harlot in Gaza and “went in unto her.”

There’s a lot of going “in unto her” in the Bible, and plenty of incest too, as in the story of Lot, who got so drunk, he didn’t realize his daughters had conspired to have sex with him so they could have children.

The Bible’s Song of Solomon is basically a steamy poem that rhapsodizes a full-menued sexual congress between two unmarried people.

“Blow upon my garden that its fragrance may be wafted abroad,” it reads. “Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits.”

Get a room! And what do you mean when you say, "her breasts are like twin fawns that graze among the lilies"? We're going to need a diagram.

How did the Moms for Liberty miss this flagrant crotch novel of unholy carnality and yet spring into censorship mode over books as innocuous as And Tango Makes Three, the heartwarming and true story of two male penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo who raised an orphaned penguin chick together?

Fortunately, we have civil rights advocates like Barry Silver here in Palm Beach County to pick up the glaring lack of consistency in the Moms’ approach to book banning.

Silver, a civil-rights lawyer and rabbi with a son who was recently in the Palm Beach County Public School system, filed an objection to the Bible being allowed in a public school library.

Silver pointed out that the Bible’s pages are packed with “misogyny, violence, sexual conduct, rape, incest, animal cruelty, abuse, antisemitism, anti-science and indoctrination.”

It’s a safe bet that his efforts will be unsuccessful. School administrators and a material review committee have already ruled that “an objective study of the Bible and or religion” is permitted in public schools.

So, it will probably be a formality for school board members to hear Silver’s complaint this week and rule against it again.

This isn’t Silver’s first foray into challenging how religion is interjected in public schools.

In 2015, he complained that school materials relating to Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States provided misleading information by claiming, “The Quran, the holy book of Islam, calls for Muslims to be peaceful, not to kill.”

Silver filed a lawsuit that pointed out 17 passages in the Quran as a counter argument.

“While there are many peaceful and pleasant Muslims, and there are many peaceful and pleasant parts of the Quran, there are plenty of other passages in the Quran which are not peaceful and which encourage Muslims to kill and instruct them not to be peaceful towards non-believers.”

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Silver argued that obscuring the Quran’s full teachings was an act of “political correctness” that amounted to unconstitutional religious advocacy. That didn’t stick, either.

As a side note, if you think Silver’s multiple campaigns against religion in public schools are the most longshot legal challenges of his career, you’d be wrong.

He once tried to get pets in Florida legal standing in court, which would allow them to file their own lawsuits and collect damages for pain and suffering at the hands of humans.

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Frank Cerabino: School announcement outside jail? High cost of politicizing school boards in Florida

Today, we don’t have plaintiffs in Florida civil courts named “Fido.” But it’s not because Silver didn’t give it a try.

Frank Cerabino is a columnist at The Palm Beach Post, a part of the USA TODAY Florida Network.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Palm Beach County School Board considers request to ban Bible