Pending placement.
A short essay by Stacey Kilgore on what he found when he read Tennessee’s library law and tested it against the King James Bible.
The companion op-ed to this catalog is currently with editors at the Knoxville News Sentinel. Pending placement, the full text is not yet available here. When the piece publishes, this page will link to the publisher’s version (and, where rights permit, archive the full text below for reference).
Working title
“Knox County removed Roots for one passage. By that standard, the Bible would not be on the shelf either.”
What it argues
The op-ed makes the same case as this catalog, in a shorter and more personal voice. It begins with the Knox County Schools removal of Roots on May 14, 2026, walks through the 2024 amendment of T.C.A. § 49-6-3803 that targets material containing prohibited content “in whole or in part,” and presents the catalog’s 147-passage finding as the test of whether the standard is being applied evenhandedly. It is roughly 930 words.
The piece argues that the same protection — literary, historical, and cultural value — that quietly shields the King James Bible from a mechanical, passage-counting statute is the protection that Roots, Maus, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia all deserve. Either that protection applies to every book of acknowledged value, or it applies to none of them. And it argues that the difference between “applies to every book” and “applies to none” is, in practice, just a question of which books happen to have champions.
When it will appear
This page will be updated when the op-ed places. Press contacts and journalists who would like an embargoed copy in advance can write to the contact address on the press page.