Florida school removed Bible from shelves over “sexually explicit content”

The Bible has returned to school shelves in one Florida district after it was briefly removed after being challenged last week under a recent state law.

Volusia County Schools instructed school officials to remove the book from classrooms on Monday after it was challenged by Christina Quinn last week, Orlando’s WOFL reported. Under Florida’s HB 1069, an expansion of the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law that went into effect in July, parents are allowed to challenge any book they deem inappropriate. The law requires challenged books to be removed from school shelves pending a review.

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Quinn challenged the Bible for containing what she described as “sexually explicit content.”

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“I wouldn’t say it’s just to prove a point,” she told WOFL. “It is basically saying ‘What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,’ so we can’t pick some [books] and not pick others when they both have similar material.”

By Tuesday, the book was returned to school shelves following a three-day review. The district reportedly found that state law protects the Bible and other religious texts from removal.

According to WOFL, of 31 books that have been challenged this school year, the Bible is the only one that Volusia County Schools has returned to shelves without any restrictions.  

This isn’t the first time the Bible has been challenged under state and local laws in communities across the country that allow parents or community members to challenge books.

Sexual passages in the Bible include several passages about breasts, naked individuals, men sleeping with “harlots” and “concubines,” various men who “bruise” women’s “virginity,” a passage about “dashing” kids to pieces in front of their parents’ eyes, and a story from the Book of Genesis where Noah’s daughters get him drunk so they may have sex with him. There is also a particularly explicit passage in the Book of Ezekiel about a promiscuous sex worker who “lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.”

In June, a school district in Utah removed the book from elementary and junior high schools after a parent challenged it under a 2022 state law requiring public K–12 schools to remove books containing “pornographic or indecent material.”

The anonymous parent’s December 2022 book challenge described the Bible as “one of the most sex-ridden books around” and included an eight-page list of passages they said should be considered unacceptable under the law, citing instances of “incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide.”

Later in June, the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) requested that a Colorado school district ban the Bible based on the same criteria that led it to ban three books for “inappropriate sexual and violent content.” In a June 22 letter to Academy School District 20 superintendent Tom Gregory, the FFRF’s staff attorney Chris Line cited numerous examples of violent and sexually explicit Bible passages.

“The District must hold religious texts to the same standards it holds all other library books, review them, and, if they contain the same inappropriate content as the bible, must also remove them under the District’s standards,” Line wrote. “Removing the bible for its obscenity or graphic sexual content based on neutral criteria is not religious discrimination.”

In July, FFRF made a similar request of Leon County Schools in Florida, after the district reportedly removed five books from school library shelves.