If there's one undeniable advantage to the Harry Potter phenomenon, it's that because of the movie, even more children are rushing to buy JK Rowling's books. Children who might have gone through life hating and fearing the written word - the American Way - are now reading voraciously, for sheer pleasure and without being prompted by parents or teachers. This matters in a country where a staggering number of households have only three books in them: the Bible, the White Pages and the Yellow Pages.

Despite the tantalising prospect of a generation of American children being turned into lifelong readers, the Christian right is trying to block the use of Potter books by schools, despite overwhelming evidence that they enhance literacy and comprehension skills, and are well-written. This sort of censorship is to be expected in the culture-phobic deep South, where bigots have long scanned school reading-lists for evidence of Godless secular humanism, or in Berkeley, California, America's HQ for PC creeps on the left. The first lot hate The Catcher in the Rye with a vengeance, while Berkeleyites think we should burn Huckleberry Finn and the works of Joseph Conrad.

You expect it less in southern California, but that doesn't bother the likes of Ron Matthews, president of the Ventura County Board of Education, who sees Potter as a threat to the nation's youth. "What goes into the mind gets processed," he says. "Harry is endorsing demons and goblins, and witchcraft, and it opens up the floodgates for demonic possession."

These thoughts were endorsed by an LA parent, who last year removed her son from a class with Potter on the reading list": "Harry Potter does not belong in a classroom setting. The title of the book is Sorcery and sorcery is witchcraft."

What all this means for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, God only knows, but you have to love the idea of Harry Potter as Satan's Little Helper.