He organized the texts under headings like “child abuse,” “sex trafficking,” “death penalty for homosexuals” and eight other types of “harmful passages.” Three pages of text were grouped under “antisemitism in Christian scripture.”
In his May 19 letter to Burke, Silver attached 13 pages of passages to make his point. He appealed the school’s decision to Superintendent Burke in late May. Per the district’s policy, a committee reviewed the Bible after Silver’s challenge and decided it would stay, according to letters provided by Silver. Through a State Attorney’s Office spokesperson, Aronberg said his office lacks the authority to remove or investigate books in schools. The governor’s office did not respond, he said.
Silver sent nearly verbatim complaint letters to DeSantis and Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg in March. Gottcent, which is described as “a critical evaluation of the Bible as an expression of culture, language, and art,” “Bad Girls of the Bible: And What We Can Learn from Them,” “The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language,” the Catholic Study Bible and the Oxford Annotated Bible. The second copy was lost.Īmong other titles available are: “The Bible: a literary study” by John H. The school district’s online library catalog shows Olympic Heights Community High School has one of two copies of the King James Version available. Silver, whose two sons graduated from Olympic Heights Community High, asked the school’s principal in April for the removal of “any and all Bibles” that may be in the high school, according to written correspondence he shared with the South Florida Sun Sentinel. Spokespersons for the governor did not return an email seeking comment. School Board members did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Silver, an attorney whose website says he is a “social activist Rabbi-rouser,” filed a written request on June 14 to have a hearing before the Palm Beach County School Board on his Bible ban request, after it was denied by the principal of Olympic Heights Community High School and Superintendent Michael Burke. It hasn’t made the organization’s top 10 list before or since. It was among the top 10 challenged books in 2015, ranking in sixth place. Johnson, both non-fiction works about the authors’ experiences as queer people.īut challenges to the Bible aren’t new, the ALA’s data show. 1 challenged book was “Gender Queer: A memoir” by Maia Kobaba, followed by “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. There were more attempts to censor library materials in 2022 alone than in 2021, 20 combined, according to data from the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. In 2022, there were 1,269 demands to censor library materials, nearly double the 729 demands in 2021.Īll 13 of the top challenged books last year were contested because of LGBTQIA+ content or claims of sexually explicit content, according to the ALA’s list. “But if you’re going to start banning books, you better do it even-handedly, otherwise what you’re doing is censorship.” I don’t like banning books,” Silver said during public comment at the Palm Beach County School Board meeting on June 14. The two laws say classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity is prohibited from kindergarten through eighth grade and must be “age appropriate” in 9th through 12th grade, and school districts are required to allow parents to have a say in what reading materials are available in libraries and in classrooms. Last year, DeSantis approved the Parental Rights in Education Act and a “curriculum transparency” bill, House Bill 1467, two measures under his “Year of the Parent” aimed at giving parents “fundamental rights to make decisions regarding the upbringing of their children” and at preserving “the rights of parents to make decisions about what materials their children are exposed to in school,” the governor’s office wrote in news releases about the bills. That’s why he’s now one of several activists across the state who have asked that the Bible be removed from public schools, arguing that it contains the very language that the governor has vowed to protect children from and to give parents the authority to challenge. Ron DeSantis that the school system shouldn’t be used to “indoctrinate” children.
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