The Latest Atheist Battle is Banning Bibles in Hotels

According to the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), the Bible is so dangerous it may actually “endanger your health and life.”  Really?  That’s right … according to this radical anti-Christian organization.  FFRF thinks the Bible should even have a skull and crossbones warning label as appears on hazardous materials.

The controversy began when FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor came to the Northern Illinois University to give a speech.  While staying at the University’s Holmes Student Center Hotel, she and her husband, FFRF co-president Dan Barker, were shocked to find a copy of the Bible in their room.  They found its presence “obnoxious, inappropriate and unconstitutional” … given it was in state-run lodging.  Even more absurd was their claim that they were “proselytized in the privacy of their own bed-rooms.”  So, now they’re trying to ban Bibles in public hotel rooms.  They consider their cause to be an “important consumer complain, much like asking for smoke-free rooms.”

More absurd, however, is that the university actually caved-in, even though it was not the one to officially place them there to begin with; they merely allowed a Christian group, the Gideons, to leave it in their rooms.  Moreover, no one is ever forced to pull the Bible out of the nightstand drawer and open it, much less read it.

The American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ), which is urging public hotels not to ban the Bible in rooms, also points out the group is dead wrong on the law.  FFRF claims the Bible should be banned because they find it “obnoxious.”  Yet, in reality, the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has stated just the opposite.  SCOTUS has held that adults should be able to withstand “speech they find disagreeable,” without imagining that the ‘establishment clause’ is violated every time they “experience a sense of affront from the expression of contrary religious views.”  By extension, requiring the elimination of Bibles in hotel rooms owned by public universities would, as the SCOTUS has found in other contexts, “lead the law to exhibit a hostility toward religion that has no place in our Establishment Clause traditions.”

There is no coercion; no proselytizing happening here.  Instead, it’s once again clear that those holding themselves out to be freethinkers are threatening smaller institutions with constitutional claims that would fall flat in court.  FFRF is in the business of making threats … even though every time they go to court, they always lose.  The U.S. Constitution is not on their side.  And with these latest shenanigans, neither is common sense.

Given their nonsensical reasoning, perhaps the phone book ought to be removed from hotel rooms as well.  That represents thousands of people sharing your bedroom!

Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.

Chaplain (Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army

Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel