What is wrong with these people?

The weekend has been given over to the writing of the article I was meant to send to Rachel about a month ago, which means a lot of today has involved using Google Books to search for lines I half-remember from sources I got out on Inter-Library Loan last year but couldn't use for my actual thesis draft because there's only so much insanity that can be packed into 30,000 supposedly academic words. Specifically, I spent two hours searching for the sources where I first read about the event described below, less because it was the perfect lead-in for the section of the article I'm working on and more because it's so twitch-inducing that I've wanted to use it somewhere since the first time I read about it:

There is a long history of pressure groups influencing the content of textbooks in the United States, but the history of religious and specifically Christian pressure and influence has the longest standing. An incident that goes a long way towards providing sufficient historical context is that which occurred in Philadelphia in 1844, one of many such incidents that took place in the United States at the time, which is best summarised as a lengthy dispute between the Protestant majority and Catholic minority over Bible reading in the public school. It will probably surprise a modern reader somewhat that the issue was not that the Bible was being read, but that the version used was not in keeping with the practises of the Catholic Church of the time, and both parents and bishops objected to the Catholic student minority being forced to participate.  The initial request that Catholic students who refused to read the Bible aloud in class not be beaten for their refusal was generally ignored by school officials, and further requests were met with violent anti-Catholic demonstration on the part of Protestants who believed that the failure to fully ‘Protestantise’ Catholic children would lead to a Catholic takeover of the United States.Other religious minority students, such as those of the Jewish and Quaker faiths, faced similar challenges, and it appears that the school boards generally considered having the teachers flog students who made protest on religious grounds as opposed to expelling them outright to be a more than sufficiently merciful accommodation of their beliefs.[i]

This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I could timehop a few hundred years into the future to see what our descendants think of this whole censorship matter, especially the part where adults are so determined to keep teenagers and young adults from learning about things like biology, anatomy, and critical thinking (think I'm joking? Wait until I get around to the next article). But then, if I was offered the chance to see where this goes I probably wouldn't want to take it. If the past is anything to go by, it's even odds that our descendants will be just as committed to a slightly different yet equally disturbing vein of censorship. 

 

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[i] I haven't found all of the sources from which this paragraph draws, but the major one is Joan Delfattore, The Fourth R: Conflicts Over Religion in America's Public Schools.  (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 32-46.