Textbook Ploy to Get Religion in the Schools

Re “Place Sought for Bibles in Public Schools,” Jan. 12: It is about time that someone like Huntington Beach attorney Matt Mclaughlin exposed how putting Scripture in literature classes can sharpen one’s thinking. Nothing else known to humans could possibly do that. All I ask is that the Bible not be placed in schools at taxpayers’ expense, as McLaughlin desires, or otherwise. Instead, place the book on a recommended reading list for students to purchase on their own. That way they can choose between Noah’s Ark and “The Martian Chronicles.” The cost of $200 million out of a depleted state budget seems a bit insane to supply schools with a book that students can purchase on their own, as they do so many other “novels.”

Oh, one more request: that the book be placed on the fiction list of reading material, perhaps under mythology, where it rightfully belongs. This is a slimy way for the religious nuts to get Christianity in our schools. God save me from your followers.

Jerry Locke

Cypress

*

I am so glad that McLaughlin is gathering signatures for the King James Bible as textbook initiative. With its obvious (to those of us who have read it) but underappreciated emphasis on sex -- the stories of Adam and Eve, David and Bathsheba, Amnon and Tamar, the homosexual relationship of David and Jonathan, and other licit and illicit but quite explicit relationships too numerous to count, the detailed descriptions in the laws of Leviticus, and the Song of Songs, among other passages (I would include quotations, but these are inappropriate for a family newspaper!), maybe the Bible could be used as a sex education text also.

Daniel J. Fink

Los Angeles