If you thought American book-banning couldn’t get any more ridiculous, think again. A school district in Utah, one of the most religious states in the country, has banned the Bible.

The Bible – fundamental to the state’s Protestant, Catholic and Mormon churches – is to be removed from elementary and middle school libraries for containing ‘vulgarity or violence’. The authorities for the school district of Davis County, just north of Salt Lake City, upheld a parental complaint that the Bible contained ‘incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide’. The parent, who attached an eight-page list of verses unsuitable for children, wrote: ‘Get this PORN out of our schools.’

The request – which appears to be liberal retaliation for right-wing censorship – comes a year after Utah passed a state law prohibiting books with ‘pornographic or indecent’ content from Utah schools. Until now, the restricted works have mainly been LGBT or race-themed books such as the graphic novel Gender Queer and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Utah’s staunchly religious and conservative legislators have done their own cherished causes a grave disservice

The parent’s apparently pseudo-conservative complaint may be tongue-in-cheek, provocative or hypocritical, but it has been enabled by the state’s censorious lawmakers. The irony is that zealous religionists, who tried to protect their children from content they don’t like, have found their edict weaponised against the books they find most meaningful.

This furore is part of a much larger (and worrying) trend in American education. In March, the principal of a school in Florida was forced to resign after a parent complained that their child, aged 11 or 12, was shown pornography. The image was Michelangelo’s David.

Western culture is under threat from both extremes of America’s political spectrum. Though we usually see conservatives as more likely to defend the ‘canon’, in America the right is at least as censorious and snowflakey as the left. As the Utah law highlights, so-called conservatives are so prone to cancel culture that they are willing to engage in governmental overreach that threatens the freedoms of the First Amendment.

Still, in determining whether to take the Bible off school library shelves, the education authorities in Davis County displayed commendable impartiality. The committee – which, given the demographics of the district, is bound to be predominantly conservative and Mormon – has also been called upon to review a complaint against the Book of Mormon. The American Inquisition continues.

Despite the contradiction of campaigning against book censorship by campaigning to censor a book, I’ve developed unexpected admiration for the gumptious parent who challenged the Bible. At least he or she had read the text. One of the books sent for review by right-wing parents in Utah was SEX: If You’re Scared of the Truth Don’t Read This! Rather than some sort of Satanic forbidden fruit, as the complainants supposed, the book turned out to be a manifesto for abstinence.

Utah’s staunchly religious and conservative legislators have done their own cherished causes a grave disservice. The mess they have created demonstrates the utter madness of book-banning. As the Good Book says, you reap what you sow.