I’ve got some advice for book banners, “Be careful what you wish for!”

Earlier this month, the parent of a child from a Utah school district near Salt Lake City convinced the district to remove the Bible from its elementary and middle schools on the grounds the book contains verses which are too vulgar or violent for younger children. The action was authorized under a 2022 state law which banned “pornographic or indecent” books and instructional materials from schools, with the de-selection to be made by the local school board, including “parents who are reflective of the members of the school’s community.”

Utah’s law is part of a national trend, one driven largely by conservative Christian groups and backed by the GOP., to enact measures that either prohibit, or give parents the power to challenge school curricula, books and teaching materials that offend their beliefs, notably on issues of sexuality, violence and racial equity. The pretext is that school children need to be protected from topics that are harmful or upsetting to them.

In early May here in Maine, three Republican-sponsored school bills, one to ban race-related lessons, a second to bar obscene materials, and a third to create a suitability rating system for library materials, were considered by the Legislature’s Education and Cultural Affairs Committee.

In one of the worst incarnations of this trend, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, formerly President Donald Trump’s scowling press secretary, signed into law a measure which would subject to criminal prosecution librarians who lend materials “harmful” to minors, including anything depicting or describing nudity or sexual conduct. A coalition, led by the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock, has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law, due to take effect on Aug. 1.

Rather than dwell on the obvious arguments often raised against book-banning laws — namely, that they’re unconstitutionally broad, vague and chill the right of free speech, or that many of the world’s finest literary masterpieces have been censored — let me focus on something that even the most rabid book banners should be able to comprehend. The very thing their proponents are trying to achieve will come back to bite them.

The Utah parent’s challenge to the Bible is a case in point.

The Bible is the most widely read and influential work in Western literature. It’s accepted as sacred by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It was the first book printed on the revolutionary Gutenberg movable type press around 1455, and an estimated 5 to 7 billion copies have been printed since then.

Most of the world’s great authors, artists, philosophers and statesmen have been influenced by the Bible. Countless theater productions and movies have dramatized it. Its phrases permeate our everyday speech, its concepts our fundamental cultural outlook.

Yet this enormously consequential volume might be verboten in classrooms and libraries under the type of laws now being passed, simply because it contains sexually explicit and violent content.

Face it. The Bible is filled with stories of sexual depravity, brutality and other examples of the basest types of human behavior. It is replete with horrifyingly graphic accounts, which, if dramatized on video or television, would send parents scurrying to hit the “pause” button on their children’s remotes.

Consider just a few well-known examples in the Old Testament: fratricide (Cain killing his brother Abel); the mass slaughter of innocent civilian populations (Noah’s flood, the incineration of Sodom and Gomorrah, the death of Egypt’s firstborn, Joshua’s massacre of the inhabitants of Jericho, King Saul’s execution of the priests of Nob); adultery and murder (King David impregnating Bathsheba, then sending her husband to his death in battle to hide the adulterous affair); extortion and murder (Queen Jezebel arranging for the execution of Naboth on false charges so that her husband King Ahab could acquire the man’s vineyard); corruption and betrayal (Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers, Delilah accepting a bribe to disable and turn her paramour Samson over to his enemies, the Philistines).

The New Testament is less bloody than the Old, but the description of Jesus’ crucifixion is hardly the stuff of bedtime stories. Crucifixion was a slow, agonizing means of capital punishment in which the condemned person was tied or nailed to a wooden cross or beam and left to die of asphyxiation over a period that could last for days.

Many readers, including people of faith, treat these biblical stories as largely allegorical, metaphorical or didactic, created or embellished by their writers to teach a moral lesson.

But those with fundamentalist beliefs consider them to be divinely inspired and literally true.

Yet, if the Bible is literally true, then, by definition, it contains precisely the kind of “harmful” content that book-banning laws seek to remove from classrooms and library shelves.

To be sure, you won’t find any mention of gay pride, gender identity, critical race theory or other “woke” topics in the Bible, at least not under those exact labels. But you’ll find plenty in there that could upset a young child.

So to add a new twist to an old maxim: Do you really want to throw out the Bible with the bath water?

Elliott Epstein is a trial lawyer with Shukie & Segovias in Lewiston. His Rearview Mirror column, which has appeared in the Sun Journal for 17 years, analyzes current events in an historical context. He is also the author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be contacted at epsteinel@yahoo.com. 

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