In a highly controversial move Tennessee’s Fuckle County has voted to ban the Holy Bible – both Old and New Testaments – following a vigourous campaign by a coalition of religious fundamentalists and extreme right-wingers who claimed that the publication promoted adultery, drink, drugs, sex and other unpatriotic values such as pacifism. “The damn book is nothing but filth – sex and violence all the way through! There is no doubt in my mind that it is a corrupting influence on the minds and morals of our young people – it has no place in our schools, none at all, ” says Reverend Zeb Nennen, one of the coalition’s leading lights. “The Old Testament in particular is nothing but a catalogue of begetting and smiting! Brothers murder eachother, rich children are kidnapped and brought up as paupers – its worse than Jerry Springer!” Nennen and his cohorts are also worried that Jesus sets a poor role model for the County’s youth. “Dammit, not only is he a bastard – his father Joseph being cuckolded by some fella with wings – but he dishonours his parents by throwin’ up a good career as a carpenter to grow his beard and hair long, take up with a bunch of work shy layabouts, and wander around preaching free love and peace and the like! Damn troublemaker! Consorting with beggars, thieves, lepers and prostitutes, sponging off the state – no belongings to his name! To top it all he’s goin’ around turnin’ water into wine with his illegal still! What kind of example is that for kids? His folks musta bin real ashamed of him,” the old loon ranted, his white beard matted with spittle, as he presided over a mass Bible burning ceremony outside Fuckle County courthouse. “As for that business in the desert and seein’ the devil and such like, clearly he wasn’t just drunk, he was on drugs as well! And what about his hangin’ around with twelve other fellas all the time – now your not goin’ to tell me that’s natural! I’ll tell you, if some doped up hairy hippie came around here preachin’ his free love and pacifism – the unpatriotic yellow bastard – an’ offerin’ free booze an’ drugs to impressionable kids, well, we’d have ourselves a lynchin’! Its no wonder those Romans crucified him!”

Joe Snicket, prominent local Republican councillor and leader of a local citizens’ militia wholeheartedly agrees with such sentiments, worrying that the Bible also promotes Zionism and communism.. “There are just too many Jews featured in the Old Testament for my liking – it glorifies their dubious history, portraying them as victims and as being God’s chosen people,” he says. “As for the New Testament – well, its clear that this Jesus character – who let’s not forget was Jewish too – is promoting a basically socialist agenda, calling for the redistribution of wealth and the overthrow of the existing status quo in favour of the ‘Kingdom of God’, a world government by another name. Quite clearly the whole of the Bible is simply promoting the evil Zionist-Marxist world government conspiracy.”

Members of Tennessee’s State legislature are now worried that, following their success in Fuckle County, the coalition could extend their Bible-banning campaign state-wide. “It damn near happened that time those crazy bastards down there insisted the sun went around the Earth and succeeded in having the flat earth theory taught in their schools,” recalls Governor Frank Cleaver. “The legislature was besieged by hordes of lunatics burning globes and maps for three days after that – we had to call out the National Guard! Banning the teaching of evolution in schools or curtailing a woman’s right to an abortion is one thing, but banning the Bible? They’ll make us a laughing stock!” Foreign observers are alsodeeply troubled by the Bible-banning campaign and other recent developments in the US. “It is deeply ironic that the very nation which is using its technological might to impose proper ‘democratic’ and moral values on the rest of the world is, at home, entering a new dark age, rejecting both religion and science and abandoning even their most fundamental moral values in favour of the purely material comforts provided by Western consumerism,” says Ayatollah Om Kassah, a leading moderate Iranian cleric. “Indeed, we in the Islamic world are so worried for the moral and spiritual well-being of our American cousins that we are planning to send missionaries to the US to teach them the true way of God and thereby save their souls!”

However, even as the local Ku Klux Klan organised Bible burnings countywide, and even started tearing down effigies of Christ from churches and burning them, the coalition’s leaders remained unrepentant, believing that they had tapped into a powerful undercurrent in US popular opinion. “We just want to see religion embrace decent moral values again and represent the views of average white American folks. People don’t want to hear that defeatist peace and love talk! They want a God who goes around smitin’ down their enemies – just like in the old-time religion,” Nennen opines. “They don’t want to hear that its OK to have a child by a man other than your husband because the kid could turn out to be the Messiah – and that you’ll be deified and worshipped by heathens the world over for your adultery! No, they want a Messiah whose Momma was a fine upstandin’ churchgoing woman! They especially don’t want to hear that that the pursuit of wealth is evil and that they’ve got to give their colour TV and Sports Utility Vehicle they worked hard for to those poor black folks down the street in order to get salvation!”

Snicket believes that the campaign has powerful supporters. “I just thank God that President Bush (God Bless him), didn’t fall for any of that ‘turn the other cheek’ crap peddled by Jesus after September 11. No sir, he went out there and brought the wrath of the good old US of A down on plenty of foreign heathen ass,” he says, cleaning his M16A2 assault rifle (kept purely for personal protection and hunting purposes). “You see, like us, the President understands that we’ve already achieved heaven on earth here in the USA! We don’t need salvation – we are God’s chosen people and we have the God-given right to defend our paradise against all those hordes of degenerate foreign devils! Just like the only type of science we need is the type which produces faster cars, bigger TVs and better ways to kill people, the only type of religion we want taught in our schools is the type which puts the US and its values at the centre of God’s creation!”