Earlier this week, a judge in Gwinnett County, Georgia, chose to side with the forces of darkness by dismissing a lawsuit intended to protect schoolchildren from the witchcraft-inducing Harry Potter books. This ends, for now, a two-year quest by suburban mom Laura Mallory to have the series removed from county schools.
Mallory told the court Tuesday that she has testimony from children who have read the books and have thought about using magic and acting out spells described there. The school board's position is that the books help encourage children to read and think creatively, which is just what you would expect the Devil to say. Mallory was not fooled. "They don't want the Easter Bunny's power," she said of today's children. "[They] want Harry's power, and they're getting it." I guess the Easter Bunny has placed its mighty colored-egg-hiding power in the service of good, and that's reassuring, but apparently kids today are more interested in being able to fly and whatnot.
The only legal argument mentioned in the article was Mallory's position that, because witchcraft is a religion to some people, the Potter books should be banned because reading them in school thus violates the constitutional separation of church and state. Ah! Clever, but on a collision course with Mallory's other position: "I have a dream that God will be welcomed back in our schools again [once this other religion is kicked out]." This slight inconsistency was ferreted out by the court, causing Mallory to lose and to tell reporters that, as the article put it, "it may be time to rethink her arguments with the help of an attorney," which she did not have. "I maybe need a whole new case from the ground up," she told reporters. Well, it's never too late to get one, except on appeal.
For much more info than you would ever want about how Harry Potter is of the Devil, you could go to the "Harry Potter is of the Devil" webpage. Or (and this is probably safer) you can just imagine what that page is like based on the fact that, in addition to dozens of anti-Potter articles, it also warns against Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Casper, the UN, Pocahontas, Peter Jennings, the Pope, the Lion King, Bill Clinton, Pokemon, South Park, and somehow even "Touched by an Angel" and Christianity Today, all of which appear to be joined in a vast Satanic conspiracy.
I always suspected Peter Jennings of being the Antichrist, but then I found out he was just Canadian.
The same types of charges have been leveled at the Potter books around the world, including in Russia, where the Moscow City Prosecutor's office declined to press charges against the publisher of a Russian-language version in 2002. But Harry Potter has survived worse than that in Russia, including the far more serious charge that the character of Dobby the House Elf is "insulting to the head of state" because he looks too much like Vladimir Putin:
These conspiracies go far deeper than I ever imagined.
Link: Pensacola News Journal.com
Link: American Library Association (on the Russian case)
