On January 29 I put up a brief post noting that someone had complained about the presence of Gideon Bibles in the guest rooms at Iowa State University’s (ISU) Memorial Union, lodgings that are part of a public university. I also reproduced the letter that the ISU got from the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) saying that those Bibles were a no-no—a violation of the First Amendment. The letter worked: no litigation was necessary. The University removed the Bibles.

There are many reports of this victory on the internet, but I was most interested in the one at the Christian News Network, as the coverage was most extensive and I hoped there would be some funny comments.

Last week, Memorial Union Director Richard Reynolds responded to the correspondence via email, advising that the university would comply with FFRF’s request. “The concern you raised about the availability of Bibles in the guest rooms of the Memorial Union has been taken under advisement and, effective March 1, 2014, the Bibles will be removed from the hotel rooms,” he wrote, noting that officials will move the Bibles to the university library. Following receipt of the email, FFRF issued a news release stating that it had “scored another victory for secularism.”

Naturally the religious were affronted; they don’t like it when the Constitution prohibits this kind of proselytizing. The FFRF was also victorious in a similar case in Madison, Wisconsin, the home of its headquarters:

As previously reported, FFRF likewise convinced the University of Wisconsin last month to remove Gideon Bibles from its Lowell Center guest rooms following a complaint. But some stated that the university should not have caved due to the offense of a single complainant. “How thin-skinned have we become in our country that we can be offended because a Bible is placed in a drawer in a room? If you disagree with the Bible and find it to be a farce or fairy tale, then just ignore it,” Jeff Shergalis, assistant pastor at Madison Baptist Church, told Christian News Network. “I have never been offended when in the lobby of a doctor’s office I see a copy of Mother Goose stories,” he continued. [JAC: that’s a remarkably apt comparison!] “It seems strange that people who claim to be so intellectually superior that they are above believing the Bible are so easily offended by it.” “Many of our founding fathers read the Bible, quoted the Bible, and believed the Bible,” Shergalis added. “It seems very sad when a city that is named for a president who declared a ‘National Day of Prayer and Fasting’ is so quick to remove God and His word from its facilities.”

These people seem to have no clue about the meaning and intent of the First Amendment. No atheist is calling for The God Delusion to be put in state-sponsored lodgings. If there were, could we tell the offended religionists that if they disagree with it, they could simply avoid reading it?

The state is supposed to be religiously neutral. There are plenty of Bibles around, and if you want to read one, there are light and small “travel versions” you can take with you.

I wonder what people like the following would say if they found a Qur’an in their hotel room drawer instead of a Bible.

If you want a Bible, bring your own!

This may seem like a trivial issue and victory, but remember what Clarence Darrow said at the Scopes Trial on July 11, 1925 (I love this elocution!):

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

What a speaker that man was! And I suspect that this speech was, like his plea for the lives of Leopold and Loeb, made extemporaneously.