‘God Squad’ Wants Books on Satanism Out of School

It all began innocently enough. Robert Thomas was browsing through the stacks of books at El Camino High School’s library one day last year when he spotted them--dozens of volumes on the mysteries of witchcraft and satanism.

Many students might have been intrigued, but Thomas was downright alarmed. A devout Christian, the tousle-haired 17-year-old thumbed through the books, finding page after page filled with graphic descriptions of satanic rituals and drawings depicting symbols of the occult.

“I realized that they weren’t just history books,” he recalled. “These were satanist books. They were like how-to books. I felt they had no place in a high school library.”

Linking up with two high school chums, Thomas earlier this year brought his concerns about the books to school officials. Expressing fears that the volumes would encourage students to delve into satanism and the occult, the Christian trio--light-heartedly dubbed the “God Squad” by friends--urged that the books be pulled from the library’s shelves.

Their request has prompted something of a brouhaha in the Oceanside Unified School District. For the first time in more than two decades, district administrators have formed a special review committee, which will determine the merits of the more than two dozen books and judge whether they should be banned.

The committee, staffed by school administrators and teachers, is expected to make a recommendation by the end of the week.

Meanwhile, the San Diego chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is monitoring the situation and appears ready to leap into the fray should school officials uphold the God Squad’s request. The ACLU has dispatched a letter to school officials warning them of the legal implications of the situation.

“I’m confident that censoring books on satanism and witchcraft is beyond the limits, that it’s just not constitutional under the First Amendment,” said Greg Marshall, legal director of the ACLU’s San Diego chapter. “Nobody has a constitutional right, except with very limited exceptions, to prohibit other people from reading a book, whatever its subject.”

School officials say they are taking such constitutional concerns seriously. Dan Armstrong, the district’s public information officer and one of six officials sitting on the review committee, said First Amendment guarantees of free speech “certainly will play a large role in the thinking of the committee.”

“In the academic community, the idea of removing materials such as this connotes images of book burnings and the whole area of censorship,” Armstrong said. “There certainly are folks who would interpret the removal of these books as exactly that.”

But Thomas and his allies insist that censorship is not their goal. Instead, they say, the aim of their campaign is to protect their peers. Books on the occult, they argue, are fountains of dangerous information that could entice youthful readers down a wayward path.

“This is not censorship,” Thomas said. “There are people who will be drawn to satanism because they don’t know what they’re getting into.”

Since initiating their quest, the students have been aided by Thomas’ mother, Shari, who owns a Christian bookstore in the San Luis Rey Valley.

To Shari Thomas, constitutional questions pale when compared to the moral issues of teen-agers being led astray by books she considers virtual training manuals of witchcraft and devil worship.

“They tell things in these books that are detrimental to kids,” she said. “I believe the classics belong in the library. I believe in having books on the history of witchcraft. But do you need books telling you how to be a witch? That’s like saying they should allow snuff movies.”

Thomas says the issue has stirred the conservative Christian community. In recent weeks, she has gathered the signatures of more than 250 local residents on a petition in favor of having the books pulled from the library shelves.

But the campaign has had its downsides for the students. In the weeks after their complaints about the books became public, the trio says they were subjected to catcalls in the high school’s corridors from aficionados of “heavy metal,” a brand of rock music that critics say often glorifies satanism.

“We’ve caught some flak,” Robert Thomas said. “Some of them have yelled things like ‘Satan Squad’ at us.”

Adene Murray, one of the three students pushing for removal of the books, agreed. “People were making us out to be a bunch of fanatics,” said Murray, 17. “They said we were going to attack the classics, we were going to have Mark Twain taken off the shelves. A lot of people were trying to back us down, including the administrators.”

Thomas, Murray and Robb Wood, the third member of the God Squad, first made their case before El Camino High School librarian Lloyd Kimsey in February. Kimsey asked the students to go through the books and write reviews of what they found offensive about the material.

The students discovered plenty of information that failed to jibe with their beliefs. The books, which had been ordered a decade ago as part of a literature course on mythology, include graphic descriptions of the ceremony for becoming a witch as well as depictions of pentagrams and other occult symbols.

The works cited by the students as glorifying the devil include “The Satanists,” “The Popular History of Witchcraft” and a 20-volume series published by Time-Life entitled “Man, Myth and Magic.”

Kimsey could not be reached for comment. But as the students tell it, the librarian initially agreed to pull the books from the general circulation shelves and put them in a restricted area, requiring pupils to get parental permission before checking a book out. Nonetheless, the volumes on the occult soon found their way back onto the library’s main shelves, they say.

Feeling betrayed, the students went before district administrators. Supt. Steven Speach listened to their complaints and agreed to form a review committee.

The group met for the first time last Tuesday, listening quietly as Shari Thomas and the others presented their case.

Pointing to what they described as a rise of satanism in the United States in general and the Oceanside area specifically, the students stressed that the books contain information that could prompt other students to practice satanic acts.

A year ago, for example, several animals being raised as part of an agriculture class at El Camino High School were mutilated, an act school officials suspect may have had ritualistic overtones.

In addition, Shari Thomas gave the committee a letter she received from a Marine Corps officer who said he fell into a satanic cult for a short period during his youth after reading a book that is among those under review by Oceanside school officials.

As the 90-minute meeting concluded, the committee members divvied the various books among themselves to read. The group plans to meet again Monday to begin drafting a report for Speach.

Rob DeKoven, an attorney monitoring the Oceanside situation for the ACLU, said the district can only remove the books from the library if it determines the volumes are educationally unsound or pervasively vulgar, but not for either philosophical or religious views.

“The books are clearly educationally sound and I don’t believe there’s anything in them that is pervasively vulgar,” said DeKoven, an instructor at Cal Western Law School in San Diego. “There’s really no way they can remove the books. If they pull them, I think we’ll clearly go to court.”

Moreover, DeKoven said he was troubled that the district had even chosen to review the books, suggesting that the exercise itself casts a pall over both the books and their authors.

Shari Thomas, meanwhile, refuses to let such arguments stand in the way. If school administrators refuse to ban the books, she said she plans to appeal to the Oceanside school board.

“We don’t intend to stop if we don’t get what we want,” she said. “You reach a point after a while where enough is enough. And that’s where I’m at.”