The parents in Utah who are filing complaints about the Bible in school are doing it to make a point. They're following the same (often new) book banning policies that conservative parents are using to ban books with LGBTQ characters or content.

They don't actually want the Bible banned, they're trying to show people how absurd the book banning policies are. They're pointing out that the rules are arbitrary and too vague to be applied objectively without catching pretty much anything in their net, including the Bible.

And indeed, book banning policies are proving very problematic, resulting in absurd outcomes like Anne Frank's diary being banned from school libraries.

In a couple of cases where that's happened, more progressive parents didn't do it to make a point. Conservative parents actually wanted the book out of school, and they were able to get their way by following policies that were put in place to get rid of books with transgender or gay people in them.

Never mind that generations of Americans have grown up reading Anne Frank in class. (I was 13 when it was required reading in my school.) Some parents will always have a problem with some content in books. What these book banning policies get us is school libraries that are sanitized to be unobjectionable to anybody with the slightest complaint.

That's a big problem in a free society.

Those parents in Utah are trying to show people just how bad things are getting.

P.S. I wrote that comment about an hour ago and I'm back to add an addendum after scanning today's headlines. The same school district in Utah that banned the Bible is now looking at complaint about the Book of Mormon, which is asking that it be banned from schools for similar reasons.

The group making the complaint is explicit that they're doing so to demonstrate how unworkable Utah's new book banning policies are.