The Bible wouldn’t pass Tennessee’s book-ban standard.
The companion op-ed to this catalog was published in the Knoxville News Sentinel on May 22, 2026. It makes the catalog’s case in a shorter, more personal voice.
The published article sits behind the Knoxville News Sentinel paywall. If you hit it, the full evidentiary basis for the piece — all 147 passages across 754 verses — is free and open on this site. Start with the catalog and the side-by-side comparison.
Published as
“The Bible wouldn’t pass Tennessee’s book-ban standard”
By Stacey Kilgore, guest columnist · Knoxville News Sentinel, Opinion · May 22, 2026.
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.
For press and journalists
Reporters, editors, librarians, and attorneys following this story can reach the author through the contact form. The complete dataset behind the op-ed is available on the downloads page in HTML, PDF, and spreadsheet form.