The Invisible Library

With the seventh Harry Potter book and fifth movie about to premier, there’s no shortage of Harry Potter Hysteria (HPH) to be had. This is baffling to us librarians, Harry Potter fans, or anyone with two brain cells to rub together as HPH clearly just so much Satanic Panic with a new coat of paint. So, the claims of witchcraft and Satanic initiation are clearly a cock and bull story, but what is the real motivation behind banning Harry Potter books? It could be part of the Evangelical movement’s more general disregard for worldly knowledge, book learning and anything fun. But I think it’s more specific than that. I think there is a real threat to the religious worldview in the Harry Potter books, it just isn’t Satanic in nature but secular.*

While His Dark Materials and even the Lord of The Rings are also on the Evangelical shit list, Harry Potter has become the whipping boy for their fears of a secular culture. The Harry Potter Books and films show how one can fight evil without resorting to superstitious rituals or relying on religious authority. It’s just a boy and his friends, learning to develop their inborn talents (sometimes doing so against the wishes of authority figures) to save the world. And that scares the shit out of the Religious Right. No wonder they don’t want their kids to read these books, as they will grow up to think that they can fight evil and change the world for the better without appeals to higher powers or relying on a daddy figure (because he’s dead, after all), but just by invoking the magic of hard work, friendship and cooperation and sometimes breaking the rules. Harry Potter encourages children to be rebellious, self reliant and to distrust elders, because they may not have their best interests in mind. Which is why they will go down in history as the best books, ever.

According to Omar at Orgtheory, only 73.6% of Americans believe in Heliocentrism. While this may be upsetting, we should rejoice in the fact that, according to Kieran Healy over at Crooked Timber, more people than that are down with interracial dating (83%). Kieran goes on to point out what a marvel it is that the numbers are so high for interracial dating, seeing as how it’s only been forty years since Loving vs. Virginia and there are still people (mostly elderly dinosaurs) who are again’ it. There’s no excuse however for that Heliocentrism number. We’ve known Heliocentrism to be true mathematically and astronomically for more than three centuries and we proved it empirically more than forty years ago.

So, for anyone out there still harboring a bit of doubt: yes, the Earth does revolve around the sun. This isn’t one of those questionable theories like gravity or evolution or electromagnetism, where there’s still a little wiggle room (we’re only 99.998 percent sure about those three). We know Heliocentrism is a fact because we’ve been to the motherfucking moon, people. You can’t build a rocket and go to the moon on it if Heliocentrism is false. It just won’t work. And as big a fan as I am of Interracial relationships (being in one) I’d gladly swap those numbers, if just so that I’ll be able to sleep at night knowing that almost a quarter of my fellow countrymen aren’t concerned that the leprechauns that hold them down to the surface of the Earth aren’t going to bite them in their sleep.