The Anchoress

Let’s think…if you have a prison library, what are the books you’d purge from it?

Well, I personally would not purge any, excepting, perhaps books on how to steal, assault, maim, murder or bomb, but others have different ideas.

Like ferinstance, these folks:

Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.

The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. [...]

Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an Orthodox Jew, in a federal prison camp in upstate New York, filed a class-action lawsuit last month claiming the bureau’s actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

If you read the whole (very poorly written) article you learn that the Justice Department -quite rightly noting (as this article does not) that our prisons have become hotbeds of Islamic Fundamentalist recruitment - decided there should be some strictures placed on some “religious” reading material. And, predictably, those strictures have not only been placed upon your basic Jihadi tracts, they’re also taking CS Lewis and others off the library shelves.

Seems to me the sensible thing is to declare that those religious writings (from any or all religions) which suggest that an entire culture or civilization living in the 21st Century, on Planet Earth may righteously destroy another culture or civilization by whatever means necessary, should be removed from the shelves, and all the rest - be they Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Islamic, Baha’i or whatever, should be left alone.

Why are there no sensible people working in government, who know how to make distinctions instead of sweeping generalizations? This move by the Bureau of Prisons is not completely without sense, but it’s been implemented so stupidly as to deserve heaps of scorn. It is effectively agreeing with Rosie O’ Donnell’s absurd “Christian Fundamentalism is as dangerous as Islamic Fundamentalism” remarks, by making no distinctions at all.

Incidently, in case you didn’t catch it, this is all - as with everything remotely negative - the fault of one George W. Bush, as noted here:

But prison chaplains, and groups that minister to prisoners, say that an administration that put stock in religion-based approaches to social problems has effectively blocked prisoners’ access to religious and spiritual materials — all in the name of preventing terrorism.

Well, I don’t see any quotes in this article by chaplains and ministering groups specifically saying that; I more than suspect the writer of the article is simply a BDS-sufferer who inserted the thing (and clumsily) but it’s the NY Times, so that’s besides the point. Let’s revise that paragraph a little, shall we?

As a means of preventing terrorism, an administration that puts stock in religion-based approaches to social problems saw a reasonable need to prevent prisons from becoming Islamic recruitment grounds. That such an undertaking was managed by government bureaucrats both ham-handedly and without balance or vision is unsurprising, since government involvement in almost any social undertaking either goes too far or falls into irrelevant distraction.

Hmmmm…no matter how you write it, that “puts stock in religion-based approaches to social problems” really doesn’t fit, does it? It’s really pretty damned irrelevant. But I still prefer my version.