Book burnings in Tennessee target youth literature titles like Harry Potter and Twilight.

Greg Locke, a pastor and far-right conspiracy theorist, organized a book burning for his congregation in Mt. Juliet, TN. As reported by Nashville Scene, Locke delivered a sermon before the burning, where he encouraged attendees to throw young adult titles such as JK Rowling's Harry Potter and Stephanie Meyer's Twilight, into a large bonfire on the basis that the books promoted devil worship and witchcraft.

"We have a Constitutional right and a Biblical right to do what we're going to do tonight," Locke said. "We have a burn permit, but even without one a church has a religious right to burn occultic materials that they deem are a threat to their religious rights and freedoms and belief system." Other items to be burned included Ouija boards and tarot cards.

According to Nashville Scene, there was one counterprotester at the book burning, who threw what he claimed was the Bible into the flames while holding copies of books like Fahrenheit 451 and On the Origin of Species. Published in 1953, Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 depicts a dystopian, American future wherein books are outlawed, and "firemen" are tasked with burning any books they find.

Locke's book-burning comes a few weeks after a Tennessee school board voted unanimously to ban cartoonist Art Spiegelman's graphic novel, Maus, from its district. The McMinn County School board noted the book's "unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide" as the reason for its removal. Before the outright ban of the novel, the school board apparently discussed possibly censoring the "inappropriate" words and images from the text.

Spiegelman's Pulitzer-Prize-winning Maus was originally serialized in Raw between 1980 and 1991, and has been classified as a mix of genres, from memoir and biography to history and fiction. The story follows the cartoonist, born shortly after the end of World War II, as he interviews his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and a Holocaust survivor. Maus is known for its postmodernist techniques, routinely jumping from the past to the present, and famously represents Jews as mice and Germans as cats. According to the school board, the fact that Maus is about the Holocaust did not factor into the ban.

Spiegelman described the school board as "Orwellian" when addressing the ban of his graphic novel. "I'm kind of baffled by this," Spiegelman said. "It's leaving me with my jaw open, like, 'What?'"

Source: Nashville Scene, photo by Tyler Salinas