Friday, November 09, 2007

Gideon Bibles

So Newsweek currently has an article describing a trend of hotels no longer allowing Bibles to be placed in their rooms. Certainly they have a right of providing or removing whatever objects they want into their guest rooms, but the whole story just seems somewhat bizarre to me. Like the question of why other religious materials aren't available, for example. I don't know, maybe because other religious organizations didn't want to spend whatever it costs to place a copy of their text into every hotel room in America? It's not like the Holiday Inn is the one buying these to proselytize their guests. It seems like such a skewed view of equality to think that "Providing Bibles would mean the hotel "would have to take care of every guest's belief."

From another angle, isn't it interesting what power a copy of the Bible has? Did it somehow irritate the conscience of these "wealthy, young, and trendy" people when they were confronted with a discretely placed religious text instead of an erotic game or neatly placed contraceptive?

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