Foreskins for Freedom

Danielle Smith’s Family-Friendly Apocalypse

There’s nothing like the classics to lull you into submission. Tales of noble kings, chosen heroes, and divine justice, comfort food for the moral imagination. Danielle Smith and her rodeo posse of book-banning ayatollahs would have you believe these stories are the clean, wholesome antidote to modern filth. But scratch the gilded cover and you find blood, sex, and holy depravity oozing like motor oil across the pages. This is the “safe” stuff. This is what gets a free pass.

This self-styled sheriff of morality has saddled up for a good old-fashioned book-burning. Smith wants to ban the dirty books. The smut, the filth, the soft-core lurking between school library stacks, the kind of stuff youngsters might even skip Pornhub for. She wants Alberta’s children pure, unsullied, free from the trauma of seeing a nipple in a novel or, God forbid, two men kissing. The Bible, of course, gets a hall pass. The Good Book is “safe.” The moral compass. The family-friendly alternative to Stephen King and Judy Blume.

The Grimms knew the trick: moral lessons wrapped in blood and wolves. Red Riding Hood gets swallowed whole, Cinderella’s stepsisters mutilate their feet, Hansel and Gretel torch a witch alive. Horrific, yes, but they came with warnings, a grotesque guide. Danielle Smith’s cowboy crusade would probably stamp them with a “parental advisory” sticker, yet she leaves the Old Testament wide open, where morality gets handed out with sacks of foreskins and firebombed cities. That’s when I get especially nostalgic and crack open the real bedtime stories.

I’m thinking of Samuel 18. You know the one? Picture this: post‑Goliath, David the go‑getter becomes an overnight folk‑hero. Still riding high from Goliath’s one-man apocalypse, he strides into Saul’s court wearing chaos on his sleeve and bloodlust in his grin. Saul’s son Jonathan, drenched in a preteen soul-bond scene straight out of Camp Hysteria, gives up his clothes and armor like some mystical rite of passage in a fierce, soul‑knit moment of pure devotion. It’s a scene so drenched in homoerotic fever that it reads like a lost chapter from Brokeback Mountain. Clothes come off. Weapons exchanged. Souls “knit” together. Family-friendly bromance, apparently too sacred to censor.

Then the local bar scene erupts. Israelite gals dance and chant, “Saul killed his thousands, but David? Ten thousand!” But Saul, that fragile ego wrapped in royal trappings, starts twitching under the buzz of the popular chants. Cue King Saul’s dark turn: jealousy, insecurity, and maybe a whisper of demonic occupancy—suddenly, he’s out to kill the guy. He gets hit by some evil mood. Maybe the ghost of Baal whispering death? He throws spears at his court musician-turned-commander twice, misses both times, then schemes like a drunken criminal mastermind. Can’t kill him in the palace, so he cooks up a scheme: let the Philistines do it for me.

Saul, trembling with unease, comes up with a wickedly creative plot. Here’s the setup: Saul’s got this daughter, Michal. She’s into David. Saul figures, perfect, bait the trap. He tells David, “No gold, no jewels, no fancy dowry. Just bring me the foreskins of one hundred Philistines. That’ll be your bride-price.” He says it with a straight face. Imagine the scene: a king demanding a sack of mutilated genitals as payment for his daughter’s hand. It’s obscene, deranged, and Saul thinks there’s no way David survives pulling it off.

But David—oh, David’s a lunatic in his own right. He doesn’t blink. He rallies his men, charges into Philistine country like a man possessed, and tears through them, literally. Not just the required one hundred, oh no. He comes back with two hundred foreskins. Double or nothing, baby. Drops them at Saul’s feet like poker chips at the end of a bloody, high-stakes Vegas binge. Congratulations kids, true love, biblical style. If Judy Blume had written a dowry of mutilated penises, Smith would’ve rolled a book-burning truck up to the schoolyard. But David does it? It’s a scene too gory for even Chat GPT won’t create an image for it. That’s “heritage.”

These Old Testament tales really bring home the goodness of the Abrahamic big guy. These are honest to goodness scary stories, nothing like those that Stephen King comes up with. True, they are a little scant on details. I mean, exactly how did David bring him the holy hoodie couture, foreskins as fashion? Did he like make a necklace of them? Or maybe cure them and make them into a lovely little handbag? Or maybe like the holy prepuces you find in places like Calcata, Italy, dried and kept in plush golden treasure boxes?

When I think of the word that derives from Sodom, Lot’s little town party spirals into nuclear depravity. You remember the one where Lot’s got two angels for houseguests and the townsmen come pounding on his door, screaming for a gang-bang apocalypse? Lot, in a move that scorches the brain, offers them his daughters instead. Virgins tossed out like party favors. That’s not piety. That’s pimping in Yahweh’s name. The mob snarls, the angels blind them, and the city goes up in fire. Smoke, screams, and ash in the rearview mirror. Welcome to the ride. Under Smith’s “family values” library purge, a queer coming-of-age novel is radioactive. But a father offering his virgin daughters to a mob? Gold-star scripture. Roll it out to the Grade 5 curriculum.

Onward to Egypt. Joseph, golden boy slave with a body sculpted by divine genetics, catches the eye of Potiphar’s wife. She stalks him like a jungle cat, hissing “Sleep with me” day after day. He dodges her advances like a cornered fox until one day she grabs his cloak. He bolts, leaves it in her claws, half-naked and running like a lunatic through the halls. She flips the script, screams assault, and waves the cloak like a bloody flag. Joseph lands in chains, rotting in prison, framed by lust and lies. Family values. Smith thinks two queer kids kissing in a YA novel is perversion, but Potiphar’s wife pawing at her underage slave until he bolts half-naked? That’s the moral education she’s endorsing.

But no prison walls will hold forever. Next, we slam into the book of Judges. Samson: the wild-haired freak, half-man, half-bomb. His libido is a weapon, his strength nuclear. Enter Delilah, the femme fatale with scissors in her purse. She coos, nags, seduces, digs for his secret. He toys with her, dodges, but the booze, the sex, the exhaustion wear him down. “It’s my hair,” he admits. “Cut it, and I’m done.” She waits till he’s snoring in her lap, shaves him bald, and hands him over. They gouge his eyes out and chain him like a circus beast. Love’s betrayal, the haircut from hell. Romance, scripture edition. In Danielle’s Alberta, queer kids are dangerous, drag queens are predators, but a strongman undone by booze, sex, and a haircut? That’s the kind of morality tale she thinks will keep kids pure.

And finally we come back to David. Jerusalem, springtime, war season. Kings ride with their armies, but not David. He’s lounging on the palace roof, high on power and idleness. He spots Bathsheba bathing, moonlit, perfect, untouchable. Desire ignites, reason evaporates. He sends for her, takes her, leaves her pregnant. Panic sets in. Her husband Uriah, loyal, unflinching, refuses to go home and give David cover. So David writes his death warrant, seals it, and sends him to the front lines. Uriah dies, Bathsheba moves in, and the king, God’s golden boy, is now an adulterer and murderer wrapped in luxury. And here’s the punchline: an adulterer, a murderer, a king with blood on his hands and silk sheets under his back. This is the moral exemplar Smith exempts from censorship while she torches Atwood, Blume, and whoever else makes her clutch her pearls.

And what about traditional families? The Bible is not some tidy Norman Rockwell calendar of boy-meets-girl-meets-white-picket-fence. No. It’s a savage carnival of human lust, divine confusion, and patriarchs with harems the size of small towns. Poor Isaac, the sad sap, was the only patriarch who stuck with just one wife, while Solomon, the golden boy of Jerusalem, was neck-deep in seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. A logistical nightmare that could only be explained by divine madness or the world’s most aggressive form of insomnia. His father David? A mere twenty-one wives, practically a monk by comparison, and when the old bastard got too depressed to get it up, they brought in a fresh virgin like a prescription sedative. Even then, he just stared at her like a man already embalmed.

And Jesus, sweet merciful Jesus, he was a lunatic prophet of inclusion, not the Hallmark-card hippie his PR team made him out to be, nor the AR-15 bible belt warrior. He was dropping truth bombs on adulterers, prostitutes, Samaritans, tax cheats, and any other fringe-dwellers the pious elite wouldn’t be caught dead sharing a wine jug with. He strolls up to a Samaritan woman who’s burned through five husbands and is shacking up with another guy, does he wag his finger and tell her to get married? No. He makes her goddamn first apostle. That’s some nuclear-level irony. Later, when they try to stone an adulteress to death, he pulls out the cosmic revolver: “Let the one without sin fire the first shot.” Nobody fires. Crowd disperses like cockroaches when the lights come on. Game, set, Messiah.

And the relationships…don’t get me started. The Book is loaded with arrangements that would send your average televangelist screaming into the arms of a bottle of Alberta rye: polygamous patriarchs, shared child-rearing, sisters running households together, packs of half-starved disciples abandoning their families to follow a guy who smelled like fish and prophecy. Ruth and Naomi practically co-parent with Boaz in a bizarre holy ménage à trois. Abraham, Jacob, and the rest spread their seed with reckless agricultural efficiency, fathering nations with women who weren’t their wives.

The Good Book is less a guide to suburban morality than a psychedelic road trip through every possible permutation of human connection. It’s love, lust, betrayal, improvisation, radical inclusivity wrapped in divine absurdity. A book written in blood, sweat, and other fluids the rabbis would rather not name.

These are the texts Premier Smith swears by. This is the “safe” book Alberta children will keep on their shelves while Alice Walker is deemed too purple and Stephen King goes underground. Foreskin trophies, pimped-out daughters, mass rape, adultery, murder…it’s all holy, baby. Nothing to see here.

So yes, Premier, ban the smut, protect the children. Keep them away from Orwell, Munro, and Atwood’s Gilead, but leave them free to study the story of a man who buys his wife with a sack of mutilated penises. That’s not obscenity, that’s scripture. That’s not pornography, that’s curriculum. That’s Alberta values: a future built on foreskins, pimped-out daughters, and blood-streaked morality. Amen and yee-haw. And God bless the book ban.