"I'm in the business of Jesus and this is the enemy camp."

Spiritual peanut butter ban, bitchez:

All of J.K. Rowling’s wildly popular books have been taken off the library shelves at St. Joseph’s school in Wakefield, Mass., by Rev. Ron Barker who believed their themes of sorcery and witchcraft do not belong in a Catholic setting.

"I'm in the business of Jesus and this is the enemy camp," Barker said. "It has sorcery spells and it's not appropriate."

…The removal, according to Barker, spares those students who are vulnerable to cult practices and sees his decision as no different than protecting students who are allergic to peanut butter.

"What I did is start a spiritual peanut butter ban on Harry Potter," he said.

I guess if that sort of thing sounds reasonable to you, there's nothing I could say that's going to change your mind, given that it would be contingent on rational thought and all.

Mama Shakes is all kinds of churched up—she does church stuff like a nonillion hours a week, including writing songs and singing in a gospel group—and her bedroom is seriously like a shrine to Harry Potter. I'm not kidding. I have pictures. I would post them if I thought she wouldn't kill me! But the long and short of it is that the woman eats, sleeps, and breathes Harry Potter, and the closest she's ever come to witchcraft is to mutter sarcastically, "Well, let me get my magic wand!" in retort to my sister or my whining about something.

Suffice it to say, the whole "Harry Potter undermines Jesus" stuff is lost on me.

The sad part about this is that the Potter series had been "a popular choice" as part of the school's summer reading program for sixth graders. And, as is totally bloody typical of these stories: "Barker said he had not read any of the Harry Potter books and had no plans to do so." Of course not.

[H/T Chris.]