All religions should receive equal treatment
In recent obscure news, a small jail in Moncks Corner, S.C., has banned all books except for the Bible. Inmates in this prison are not allowed to get their hands on any other magazines, newspapers or other reading material.
According to the county officials, this ban at the Berkeley County Detention Center was imposed in order to “further the pursuit of legitimate penological objectives.” South Carolina, as we all know, has dominant Christian, uber-conservative roots. But even for South Carolina, this is going a few steps too far.
“Furthering the pursuit of legitimate penological objectives” by banning all reading materials save the Bible implies that the officials believe one of two possible things: 1) that effective penalization involves removing a fundamental freedom from selective groups of people or that 2) imposing the texts of a certain religion, in this case Christianity, is how they believe they can effectively improve the behavior of these inmates. Clearly, both thought processes are just plain wrong.
Just imagine for a second that instead of banning everything except the Bible, this jail banned everything except the Quran or the Torah. Surely, the nation would be in a much greater uproar about that. The problem is that allowing the Bible and the Bible only is offensive, and it’s offensive because it’s religiously discriminatory. The ban of books is absurd to begin with, but selectively banning religious texts and allowing others shows prejudice.
The jail is currently undergoing many lawsuits, and hopefully this problem can be successfully resolved before it becomes dangerous. The last thing we would want is something like this to escalate into a blatant violation of constitutional rights, if it isn’t already.