Chaz Stevens, a 57-year-old tech wizard, noticed that Florida made it easier to challenge books used in schools and housed in school libraries. The law doesn’t take effect until July 1, but Stevens couldn’t wait that long. So he immediately launched a complaint about the Bible and the Oxford English Dictionary and requested that they be banned.
As of Wednesday, he has filed near-identical petitions with 63 Florida school districts asking to ban the Bible. He has also filed a second petition with one district, Broward County Public Schools, requesting the removal of the Oxford English Dictionary.
His three-page petition critiques the Bible for its depictions of bestiality and cannibalism, its “eye-popping passages of babies being smashed against the rocks” in Psalms 137 and its “strong pro-slavery position,” citing Ephesians 6:5-7.
“As the Bible casually references … such topics as murder, adultery, sexual immorality, and fornication — or as I like to think, Date Night Friday Night — do we really want to teach our youth about drunken orgies?” the petition asks.
Stevens’s subsequent complaint against the dictionary calls it “a weighty tome over 1,000 years old, containing more than 600,000 words; all very troubling if we’re trying to keep our youth from learning about race, gender, sex, and such.”
The Washington Post checked with First Amendment scholars, and one said “that the Bible is replete with episodes of violence and sexual abuse, including the rape of Dinah in Genesis, which leads her brothers Levi and Simeon to kill every man in the city of Shechem to avenge her honor; the incestuous rape of King David’s daughter Tamar by her half brother Amnon; and the brutal dismemberment of a concubine in Judges. She said the Bible is at least as sexually explicit as some of the books parents are labeling inappropriate, raising the question: Why can the Bible stay in the library when those books have to go?”
Two districts told Stevens that he is not a resident of their district, but he hopes to find residents in every district to file the same complaint.
A third official, Eydie Tricquet, the superintendent of the Jefferson County School District, wrote to say that her district is still under state control; Florida took over managing the district five years ago because of its failing grades, financial problems and staffing woes. But Jefferson is due to revert to local control this summer, and Tricquet promised in her email to Stevens that she will consider his request then, in accordance with school board policies and Florida law.
“At this time, I do not have a school or a library to place or remove a Bible,” Tricquet wrote.
Stevens, whose day job involves managing a website that connects people with mental health issues to supports including clinicians and therapy animals, said he knows many people see his efforts to ban the Bible as just the latest triviality in a long line of political pranks.
His colorful history includes campaigning to open city commission meetings with invocations to Satan, erecting a Festivus pole at the Florida Capitol to protest the Christmas Nativity scene and sending butt plugs to misbehaving public officials.
He pointed out that his antics once led to the arrests of two-fifths of Deerfield Beach city’s ruling body, including the mayor, over allegations they falsified records and violated state conflict of interest and gift disclosure laws.
“I’m sorry you’re stuck with me,” he said. “But I don’t see anybody else rising to the challenge, just a lot of …Twitter commentary.”
He added: “If not me, then who?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am beginning to think laughing at the right wingers is our only route to salvation and democracy, so I applaud this guy’s endeavors. And anyone who erects a Festivus pole is an ace in my book.
I find tinsel distracting.
Haaaa! Yes!!!
My own take is that celebrations of Festivus should be combined with celebrations of Fascinus.
Some classrooms or school libraries may still have \?!gasp/! encyclopedias with pictures of unclothed animals!
This is even worse than the naked mice in Maus!!!
when I was a kid my parents bought a new set of the Encyclopedia Britannica — something like 24 volumes in pretty brown covers. We kids spent a LOT of time looking at the medical pages which showed the entire (naked!) human body inside and out, with wonderful transparencies you could flip back and forth to see the organs, the blood system and the skeletal details
When I was in fifth grade my friends and I used to go to the school library (yes, there were actual school libraries in those days and not just Media Centers with computers for taking standardized test practice tests) and look up pictures of naked native peoples in the National Geographics. Sure, we had plenty of books in the library by J. Edgar Hoover, warning against the scourge of communism. But those weren’t nearly as popular.
Ah yes, The National Geographic introduced many young minds to the wonders of the unclothed human body.
The spirit of Groucho Marx is alive and well in the USA… There’s hope for you yet.
I have long been troubled by the promotion of cigarettes i Genesis: “…and Rachel lit off a camel…”
And in Jeremiah: “Thus saith the Lord: get drunk and writhe upon the ground…”
OK just a little out of context.
What was the difference between Moses and Jimmy Hoffa?
Moses said, “Pick up your shovels, climb upon your asses, and drive your camels into the Promised Land.”
Jimmy Hoffa said, “Lay down your shovels, sit on your asses, and smoke your Camels. You’re already in the Promised Land.”
And don’t get me started on flocinoxcinihilipilification
Perhaps you would like to contribute to the Bob Shepherd Campaign to end the scourge of epididymal hypertension! Each year, millions unnecessarily succumb to this horrible affliction!
Tell your friends: You, too, and be part of the solution!
flocinoxciwhat? You get started on that one, Roy, and it’ll take some time to finish!
This is my very distant memory of the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary. I will admit that I studied it in the class of Thomas McGowan at Appalachian State in 1980, and this is in distant memory. It meant something like “the reduction of things to nothingness” or something vaguely related to that perhaps. It has been a long time.
““the reduction of things to nothingness”
Happens to all of us eventually!
I wonder if Chaz Stevens included the Bible passages where God says it’s okay for parents to eat their children if their town/city is under siege and they are starving.
If Putin starts WWIII and most of our food supply is destroyed, does that mean MAGA parents can also use the Bible to justify eating their children so those MAGA parents survive to support Traitor Trump’s Big Lie another day?
May Mr. Stevens feel warmth and love of the noodly appendages of the Almighty FSM all the way from the FSM home in Russell’s teapot.
Haaaaaa! Dying with laughter, here, Señor Swacker!
Don’t forget to ban all references to baseball, Mom, and apple pie. Tampa Bay Rays used to be called the Devil Rays. Mom had sex with Dad. Apple pie was featured in the film American Pie having sex with Jason Biggs. So dirty!
In his complaint, alas, Mr. Stevens gets the facts about the Oxford English Dictionary a bit wrong. It hasn’t been around for 1,000 years. The first complete edition was published in 1928. The mistake was probably due to misreading the true observation that the dictionary draws upon a thousand years of evolution of the English language, from Anglo Saxon English to Modern English. But about that content. This and all other dictionaries must be removed from school libraries and classrooms immediately, for they contain the word porcelain.
What’s the big deal, you ask? Well, if you check out the etymology of porcelain, you will see, oddly, the entry “It. vulva.” There’s a curious story behind this word with an Italian origin. Italians, bless them, used to call a certain part of the female anatomy, the mons Venus, la porcella, meaning “the little pig,” because of the slightly humped shape. Then, when they went to the South Seas, they encountered cowrie shells, and the shape of the humped shell and of the opening at underneath (I encourage you to look this up) reminded those sailors so far from home of something they were sorely missing. So, they called these shells porcelle–little pigs, or vuvlas. Then, when they encountered Chinese and Japanese porcelains, the material of these reminded them of the material of the cowrie shells, so they called these porcelle, too. So, porcelain, from an Italian slang word for “vulva.”
Isn’t etymology wonderful? Every word has a story to tell. The poet Randall Jarrell once wrote, “A word is a world.”
And don’t get me started on the origin of “crummy” or of “pasta puttanesca”!
More reasons why dictionaries must be kept from impressionable minds!
So all those upstanding fine Floridians must get rid of their fine china as well?
Hint: a crumb used to have two separate meanings, “something delectable,” like a crumb of cake, and something with lice, because these vermin are small and crumblike. The sudden explosion of use of this word crummy was related to certain habits of “fine Victorian English gentlemen” and shows how disgusted they were by the very things that they were attracted to. How sick is that? Most cities in Europe in those days had equal numbers of churches and brothels.
So, the word crummy fossilizes a pathological set of attitudes toward certain workers. Similarly, tawdry comes from St. Audrey’s Fair, where cheap laces from the village of Ely were sold.
In the late nineteenth century, every major city in Europe had at least as many brothels as churches. Robin Williams points out that the Puritans were so repressed that even the English couldn’t stand them and kicked them out, so they brought their attitudes with them to America. The story of Thomas Morton of Merry Mount (c. 1579–1647) makes for interesting reading, if you care to Google it. The people of that colony dared to erect a Maypole and to have friendly relations with the local Indians, both of which scandalized the “good people” of Plymouth and Boston.
With the decline of the Middle Class, some may not be able to afford visit Flor-uh-duh themselves. So, for those folks, let me conjure it in your mind: Imagine a swamp (no, I mean a real swamp, with mosquitoes and cottonmouth water moccasins) with a megachurch on one side of it and a strip club on the other, each the size of a small European country. O Flor-uh-duh! Of thee I sing!