Bible Basher

The Education(!) Secretary Michael Gove wanted to implement a move to ship out thousands of King James Bibles to British schools to a tune of £377,000 at the taxpayers cost. Probably as part of the ongoing Tory Crusade against the Infidel amongst us (for Infidel read: Muslim, Jew, Sikh, the unemployed, anyone that doesn't earn over 50k a year, students, etc, etc). Thankfully the Government has seen sense and his plans have run aground (probably in the yacht he wanted to buy for the Queen the other week...). But my friend, let's call him Mr GB, wrote an email of disgust to Gove in light of this news. I present it below in full (with his permission):

Dear Mr. Gove,

I recently read in the press about your plan to send a single copy of the King James Bible to each school in the country at a reported cost of £400,000 of tax payer's money.  While I recognise that the Bible is a beautiful and important book and although I am personally very fond of the King James version, I find myself baffled and upset by this project.  At a time when frontline services are being cut, why would you want to allocate a large sum of money to a vain and obviously unpopular symbolic gesture like this?

How would a school use a single copy of the King James Bible?  Is it to be placed on a lectern at the front of the assembly hall like a copy of Mein Kampf?  If your goal is to give children the experience of there being a weighty and important book they are not allowed to touch, why not go for a spin around the charity shops and pick up a few copies of Moby Dick?  If you want children to actually become familiar with the content of the Bible, why not organise the distribution of an e-book copy of the King James Bible?  These can be read on computers, Kindles and smartphones, and there are a number of versions available freely in the public domain.  I'm not sure how effective this would be as I remember that every child in my school was given a Bible by the Gideons:  our response (which I very much regret now) was to graffiti them, actually wipe our arses with the pages, and finally see who could kick theirs the furthest across a wheatfield.  If you are hoping to instill Christian values in our
young people, I feel this is a naive way to go about it.

If I can be of any assistance to you in future, please let me know. 

Yours in anticipation of your response,

Mr. GB

PS If you have a warehouse full of unused books, I may be able to take a crate of them off your hands for no fee.

Did you know that 'Education Secretary' is an anagram for 'Cunt'?