A 754-verse evidentiary record — compiled in Knox County, by a Knox County resident, in the week Alex Haley’s Roots was removed from Knox County Schools under the same law. Not a recommendation. A test of whether the standard is being applied consistently.
An evidentiary catalog. A test of whether the statutory standards used to remove Roots from Knox County Schools can be applied evenhandedly. A record of every passage in the King James Version that meets the AAMA’s operative criteria, with text, location, category, and rationale documented for each.
A request to remove the Bible from anywhere. A critique of any reader’s faith. A partisan instrument. The author has no quarrel with anyone who finds the Bible meaningful, valuable, or sacred — including, often, in the same passages this catalog flags.
Drawn directly from the catalog — verifiable, page by page, against the public-domain KJV text.
T.C.A. § 49-6-3803, as amended in 2024, removes the literary-value safety valve and applies its prohibition to material containing the proscribed content “in whole or in part.” Five words doing an enormous amount of work. Knox County Schools’ own statement on Roots made the standard explicit: the book was elevated for review “for consideration of a passage in chapter 84.” One passage.
Catalogued under the same four statutory categories used by the Knox County review committee: 24 for nudity, 27 for sexual conduct, 16 for sexual abuse, and 93 for excessive violence. Spread across 31 of the 66 books of scripture. Every entry verifiable against any open Bible.
Either the literary, historical, and cultural value of the King James Bible protects it from a mechanical, passage-counting statute — in which case the same protection extends to Roots, Maus, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia — or that protection extends to none of them, and our libraries are being hollowed out by a rule its own authors would not survive.
I don’t want to ban the Bible. I don’t want to ban The Lord of the Rings. I don’t want to ban Roots. What I would like to ban is stupid and lazy laws.
— Stacey Kilgore · Read the full statement
All three formats contain identical content: the 147 passages, full KJV text for each, category assignment, and rationale.
Typeset, paginated, suitable for circulation to board members, attorneys, and editorial staff. ~150 pages.
Download PDF →Every passage, sortable by book, chapter, category, and verse count. For researchers who want to slice the data themselves.
Download XLSX →Single-file interactive version with the full search and filter UI. Works offline. Useful for archival.
Download HTML →The underlying KJV text is the 1611 Authorized Version in the public domain, retrieved from Project Gutenberg eBook #10. Verse counts are verified against canonical KJV totals with zero discrepancies. The statute analyzed is T.C.A. § 49-6-3803, as amended by Public Chapter 1032 (2024).
Knox County resident with a professional background in technology and operations, including prior work on the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and at SAIC. Writing on his own time, without coordination with any campaign, candidate, party, organization, advocacy group, or employer.