PHOENIX, Ariz. – It’s hard enough raising kids in this country without being allowed to smack them with a big wooden paddle every time they step out of line, but when the internet gets involved, with all its mind-warping ideas and images, a parent’s job becomes nigh impossible.
Even worse, kids stumble across a lot of the damaging stuff on the internet accidentally, exposing themselves to depictions without any context and without guidance from adults as to what they should make of the alluring, often highly-disturbing content they encounter.
One young man I spoke with recently — I’ll call him “Jeffrey” (mostly because my son Dirk would be really super pissed-off if he finds out his father has been writing about his private life on the internet without his permission) — told me he accidentally downloaded some alarming content while looking for a job.
“I’m not sure what I did wrong, but when googling job listings, there were a bunch of links to a story about some guy who found himself having his faith repeatedly tested by God,” Jeffrey said. “The more I read, the clearer it became the whole point of the story was God’s a total asshole — which is in stark contrast to everything I’ve learned from singing Christmas carols.”
As much as I tried to console Jeffrey and to reassure him God couldn’t be an asshole — because in order to be an asshole, someone has to exist first — the young man obviously was very much affected by the images and text he had encountered online. He was deeply scarred by his encounter with damaging and disparaging precepts about women, homosexuals, shellfish and tattoos.
This is why I’m in Phoenix today, where I’m filing suit against a group of internet service providers for failing to protect Arizona’s children from the deleterious effects of freely accessible religious content on the internet.
When I was a kid, if memory serves, the Bible was readily available for purchase by adults. Notably, it was always offered with a plain black cover displaying only the title of the work and perhaps identifying the group publishing it: the Gideons, the contradictory-sounding “New Standard Revised Version” or the LeBron “King” James edition.
Nowadays, this explicit, violent, child-dashing-on-rocks Biblical material is available to kids at the touch of a button. Children as young as 11 have reported being exposed to everything from women who drive stakes through their husband’s head (Judges 4:21), to young men named after popular sandwich meats witnessing the nakedness of their own fathers (Genesis 9:22).
To be clear, I’m not asking the government to ban the Bible. To do so clearly would violate the First Amendment. In addition, such a move would enable pricks like Robert Tilton to raise zillions of dollars by imploring the financially destitute and spiritually credulous via an anti-oppression telethon during which he no doubt would “speak in tongues” by reciting the nonsense syllables from the start of Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages” while shaking as though he’s in the throes of a grand mal seizure.
All I’m asking the government to do is to put religious content behind a filter, so kids like Dirk — I mean Jeffrey — won’t land on pages filled with strange stories about things they can’t possibly understand. Young internet surfers are not prepared to comprehend why we should cut off women’s hands if they interrupt an argument between their husband and another man by grabbing the other man’s genitals (Deuteronomy 25:11-12).
I also think it’s playing dirty for my critics and opponents to keep pointing out I’ve filed a variety of so-called “long shot lawsuits” before, including the one in which I petitioned the court to allow me to marry my favorite pair of knee-high tube socks.
(In case you’re wondering, despite the tyranny of the court’s order finding my socks cannot be considered an “individual” for the purposes of legal matrimony, we continue to live together happily while grudgingly accepting the second-class status of our committed relationship in the eyes of the state, as imposed by the court.)
Some folks worry that success in my latest legal action will have repercussions reaching well beyond the goal of keeping adult spiritual materials out of the hands of impressionable children. I have to admit, it probably will have such an impact — but I think we can all agree the safety of our children is worth the risk, right?
At worst, instead of easily looking up Biblical passages on the internet, adults in Arizona will have to do things the old-fashioned way: Bullshit their way through conversations in which Biblical passages come up, without worrying too much about whether such passages actually appear anywhere in the scriptures.
It’s a small price to pay in exchange for raising mentally stable, well-adjusted kids who aren’t afraid to eat shrimp and won’t try to banish their future wives to the woods during menstruation, don’t you think?
