An Attempt To Ban Harry Potter

Laura Mallory, a mother of four, of Loganville Atlanta wants all Harry Potter books banned from schools. She believes the books are 'evil' and indoctrinating children in to the Wiccan religion. While in most places this suggestion would be simply laughed off, she is in the one place that has a history of strange bannings. The most recent to memory, was the elimination of funding for spanish language fiction and considering a proposal to tweak the library's ILS to prevent users from proceeding in Spanish. There was a public outcry of course and the board was forced to recind their position on Spanish fiction and remove the 'tweaking' consideration from the agenda.

Atleast this time around the Board of Education is being more reasonable. Their attorney, Victoria Sweeny says "If schools were to remove all books containing reference to witches, they would have to ban Macbeth and Cinderella."

My problem is more with the ignorance of Laura Mallory. It is obvious by her stance that "Wicca is evil", that she has no clue about the religion. Wicca is older than Christianity and indeed a peaceful and loving religion. The creed by which they live is "Do what you will, harming none". It is also a Wiccan belief that anything of a negative nature that you do will come back to you three fold. I have done much research on the various off shoots of Wicca and have found nothing that would point to the religion being evil. So I wonder where Laura Mallory gets her information from, if she has bothered to research anything at all. I would hazard a guess that she has not even cracked a Harry Potter book open, to get an understanding of what the books really do promote. The themes that I got from the books were loyalty, friendship, trust, love and overcoming adversity. Hardly subjects that one could construe as evil.