“It’s a new age of book banning,” says ACLU lawyer, Tony Rothert.

It’s well established that religion is often used as the justification behind many of the book challenges and outright bans occurring in schools and public libraries. It’s also been seen right here in this series that the official religious texts of those same religions has come under fire in their own right at times. Both the New American Bible and the Holy Qur’an, for example, have been repeatedly suppressed around the world; but now our libraries- long thought of as impartial bastions of information- have taken to censoring access to educational resources about those religious practices that they differ in opinion from or perceive in a negative light because of intolerance or ignorance.

In a lawsuit filed in January in the U.S. district court by the ACLU on behalf of a Salem, Missouri resident it’s clear that library officials are in serious need of an elementary school civics lesson on the First Amendment.

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