The Burr in the Burgh

Barry Lynn, Director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and a Unitarian minister, is raising a stink in Florida because Gov. Jeb Bush is encouraging children to read C.S. Lewis's classic masterpiece The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Here's the article for a vomit-inducing read.

Lynn's objection is that Lewis's excellent children's book is an allegory of the story of Christ. Those Christian themes, he believes, make it innappropriate for the governor to endorse. By the same reasoning, we'd have to omit:

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare
The Divine Comedy by Dante
Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Pilgrim's Progress by Paul Bunyan
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'engle
The poetry of John Dunne
And hundreds, even thousands, of other great workds of Western literature.

And if the concern is that the governor is promoting one religion over others, then we can't promote the reading of:

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse for promoting Buddhism
His Dark Materials (trilogy) by Philip Pullman for promoting atheism
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown for promoting pop-gnosticism
And just about anything recommended by Oprah Winfrey for New Agey-ness