[This is from Fox News, so you just know it must be true. *wink* – Claire]
A new book by a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush includes a report that White House officials did not want to give the Presidential Medal of Freedom to author J.K. Rowling because her writing “encouraged witchcraft.”
According to Think Progress, author Matt Latimer in his book “Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor” writes that the award became very politicized. He states, “This was the same sort of narrow thinking that led people in the White House to actually object to giving the author J.K. Rowling a presidential medal because the Harry Potter books encouraged witchcraft.”
Now, I’m not a big Harry Potter fan, but neither am I a hater. If a kid shows up on my doorstep on Halloween dressed as Harry Potter, it won’t offend me any more than if he showed up dressed as a Hassidic Jew carrying a calculator and a bag of gold coins. I’m able to differentiate between what is fantasy (despite prejudiced undertones) and what is reality.
The truly depressing part of the Bush Administration, in my mind, was that we were being ruled by an Evangelical Christian who didn’t believe that certain Americans had a right to practice their religion. We were being ruled by a president who was part of a Right-Wing, Ultra-Christian ideology that believes that J.K. Rowling got together with the Freemasons and the Illuminati and hatched this nefarious plan to convert all of the Christian children in the United States into diabolical, baby killing, pre-marital sex practicing heathens. Is anyone really surprised that the Bush Administration objected to giving an award to J.K. Rowling? We all know that a reasoned sense of Reality was not George W. Bush’s strong point.
Sir,
You must consider the possibility that Mr. Bush with the CIA at his elbow may have known more about Rowling than you. Gordon Brown a known Freemason is her bosom buddy and the after party to the first Deathly Hallows took place at the Masonic Hall in Covent Gardens, London. The Pottter books and films bristle with Masonic doctrine and symbols.
The only flaw in your logic, which infers that Bush knew something diabolical was afoot where J.K. Rowling and Freemasons were concerned and was protecting us from it, is that George W. Bush is himself a Freemason. As is his father and as was his grandfather, Prescott Bush. In fact, most of the prominent Republicans are Freemasons. So it’s unlikely Bush was trying to protect us from the Freemasons. If anything, he was kissing the rear end of the Religious Right and Christian Evangelicals in general, to whom he owed much for keeping him in office.