ACLU on Censorship In Jail Letters
Friday July 10, 2009
The American Civil Liberties Union has sent a letter to the Rappahannock Regional Jail in Virginia, asking officials to stop the practice of eliminating passages of scripture from letters received by inmates. According to a press release, the ACLU has asked "for jail officials to guarantee in writing that the jail will no longer censor biblical passages from letters written to detainees and to revise the jail's written inmate mail policy to state that letters will not be censored simply because they contain religious material."
The complaint first came to the attention of the ACLU when a devout Christian mother sent a three-page letter to her son, a detainee at the jail. By the time officials got done with censoring all the religious passages, the letter consisted of one very short paragraph. Rebecca Glenberg, Legal Director for the ACLU of Virginia, says, "Arbitrarily banning religious material is in direct odds with our nation's constitutional values."
While it would be easy to dismiss this as just another case of Christians stomping their feet when they don't get their way, in fact, it's far more significant than that. It's important to recognize that if religious quotations from one group can be censored, then certainly other can be as well, which means that if Biblical verses can be cut out of a mother's letter, then when you send a letter including the Charge of the Goddess (or whatever), that too can be snipped away at the whim of jail officials.
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The complaint first came to the attention of the ACLU when a devout Christian mother sent a three-page letter to her son, a detainee at the jail. By the time officials got done with censoring all the religious passages, the letter consisted of one very short paragraph. Rebecca Glenberg, Legal Director for the ACLU of Virginia, says, "Arbitrarily banning religious material is in direct odds with our nation's constitutional values."
While it would be easy to dismiss this as just another case of Christians stomping their feet when they don't get their way, in fact, it's far more significant than that. It's important to recognize that if religious quotations from one group can be censored, then certainly other can be as well, which means that if Biblical verses can be cut out of a mother's letter, then when you send a letter including the Charge of the Goddess (or whatever), that too can be snipped away at the whim of jail officials.
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Comments
..uhm, they do WHAT to prisoners letters?
…why?
I’m speechless. Get the censoring sadist officer/guard out of there; it looks like they do it just to mess with inmates minds, which is abuse. Sick sick sick.
The far right types, and especially the religious right, should take note of this case the next time they start to criticize the ACLU as a religion-hating organization out to ban all religion from the US.
What’s their logic for doing that?
What? I didn’t know this. We pay them to sit and cut out religious scriptures.
It seems rather pathetic that a woman’s 3 page letter was censored down to a short paragraph. I mean seriously, is her whole conversation nothing but regurgitated scripture? Maybe the son was thankful in this case for the censoring. But seriously, I agree with the other posters – OMG why???? Is it something they do once the crossword puzzle is filled in? Insane.