Texas Preacher Declares ‘Vampire Knight’ Manga, Dried Roses To Be Satanic Works, Is Literally Villain From ‘Footloose’

Censorship is a serious issue. It's one of the reasons that we here at ComicsAlliance always show our support to organizations like the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and rally behind creators who have been subjected to governmental restrictions on their work.

Occasionally, though, there are incidents of people pushing to get books banned that slide right past concerning and directly into the world of hilarious ineptitude.

Such is the case with Reverend Phillip Missick of Texas's amazingly named King of Saints Tabernacle Church, who pushed for the Cleveland, TX public library to remove manga like Matsuri Hino's Vampire Knight from its shelves, owing, of course, to it being a demonic product of Satan that would drag otherwise saintly children directly into the gaping maw of Hell itself. That, of course, is nothing new. What makes it amazing is that he didn't stop there, going so far as to declare pretty much everything around the manga to be the product of Satan, including a few Harry Potter toys, a bouquet of dried roses, and the actual room itself, declaring them to be "occultic and demonic."

According to Missick's address to the City Council, given on August 12, he saw it as his duty to "‘watch’ and ‘warn’ against Satanic assaults against the hearts and minds of our children," and demanded the closure of the Young Adult room of the Austin Memorial Library, specifically requesting that the "occultic and demonic room be shut down, and these books be purged from the shelves, and that public funds would no longer be used to purchase such material, or at least require parents to check them out for their children.”

Again, that's pretty standard when the actual villain from the movie Footloose discovers that children are reading about vampires, but Missick also requested the removal of Harry Potter paraphernalia (a Sorting Hat and a Dobby the House Elf doll, which as we all know is basically a blood covered altar topped by a pentagram made of the ashes of an American Flag) due to their "occultic" origins. Where it goes off the rails of the standard crusading complaints, though, is when he also took aim at an occultic and demonic bouquet of dried roses.

Librarian Mary Merrell Cohn was called on to respond to Missick's allegations of demonic -- or possibly even daemonic -- activity, and did so with a 123-page statement clarifying that many, if not all of the library's books are not actually bound in human flesh and inked in blood, and very few contain forbidden names of long-forgotten Old Ones, particularly the ones in question which are mostly drawings of imaginary and incredibly dramatic vampires. As for the roses -- or as I have taken to calling them, Satan's Fingernails -- Cohn maintains that they are not used as part of ritual sacrifices and were in fact sent by her husband on their anniversary, and that drying them is a way to preserve the flower and make a room look nicer.

A likely story.

Personally, I'm hoping that Missick continues his investigation into the soul-sizzling Satanic assault on America's children through the menace of libraries, identifying other works of the Arch-Fiend that are commonly found in unsuspecting Young Adult rooms, such as hellish bookshelves, sacrificial bean-bag chairs, and posters with kittens on them encouraging children to read, which of course promote the idea that animals have souls and are capable of caring about the literacy of children, and are thus suitable for use as familiars when practicing witchcraft.

[via Robot 6]