What on earth is the problem that fundies have with Harry Potter? Some woman is marching through Georgia, book burning, right now, and she is following a well blazed path of religious hatred towards JK Rowling. They have always been good at book burning, fundies of all religions. They have this burning desire to control what the rest of us can read and see and hear. I understand that - dangerous things, words, when your whole sense of being depends on certainty that only one set of words ever written by humans is true. But why in god's name target Harry Potter?
This is one of the two great burning issues of the day (the other being global warming) and I have devoted a lot of thought (oh, ok, a little thought) to wondering what is going on. I think of the fundies as a kind of strange tribe speaking a totally unknown language and with incomprehensible society and culture and mythology, and every so often I take a peak and try to work out what on earth these strange people are up to now. [The fundies of course are peaking at me on HuffPost, probably feeling the same way, so that's fair.]
The only idea I have come up with, watching them dance around the burning piled up copies of the goblet of fire or the order of the phoenix, is that they don't want comparisons made. Only a certain four writers are allowed to write about magic tricks being performed, and they lived a long time ago. Children reading about Harry's exploits, might suddenly have an uneasy feeling that all writing about magic is made up, and then the fundamentals of fundamentalism would collapse. There must be no comparison with Harry Potter, and certainly no comparison with other religions - in the past and present, people who dared to change religion have been tortured, burnt, hung, shot, beheaded. There are no other options.
The west in general, and the US in particular have long felt the same way about other political and economic systems of course. And every time socialism emerges from yet another failed vicious capitalist state, it is quickly stamped on and destroyed. The treatment of Chavez is just the latest example of this. People must not be allowed to see alternatives to global unregulated capitalism in action. Otherwise, good heavens, they might start questioning their own religion, sorry, economic system.
Poor Harry, he is carrying the burden of a lot of fears out there.