In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury paints a shows a future where all books are banned. In the novel, censorship rules because too many people become offended by them.

The fallacy of book censorship is that banning the book will keep people from thinking about the issues in the book.

Parents and teachers especially apply this way of thinking.

They figure if sixteen year olds don’t read The Color Purple they won’t know about incestuous rape and no one will ever do it. Never mind that rape existed long before Alice Walker won the Pulitzer (it’s depicted in The Bible, in fact). Do we want a society where people don’t have a name for such a thing? Where people refuse to acknowledge it’s existence, let alone it’s ugliness?

Avoiding realities because they are “depressing” is selfish and narrowminded. It also allows the teenage mind to mold such concepts on their own.

Many teens seem to think rape is funny. Many teens have warped ideas about sex. They live in a bookless world where the people who know pretend the topic isn’t there. They find their truth in appalling places.

The other fallacy behind banning books is that an author’s depiction of an event condones that event. The Holy Bible depicts incest multiple times. It talks about men selling their daughters into slavery. It tells of women having their pregnant bellies ripped opened and their babies ripped out. Does that override it’s message of brotherly love? Which matters more to the people who read it?

Censors don’t read. They just view the words. To them, books are just entertainment for “smart people”, like television, only “boring”. The idea of reading a book in order to evaluate an idea for it’s worth is foreign to most Americans now, because challenging ideas has long been banned from schools.

Many think the best reason for banning books is the book differs from the reader’s beliefs.We feel that only black people should read about blacks, Jews should read about Jews and Christians are, under no circumstances, to shop anywhere other than Family Christian Bookstores. But if we only read books about ourselves, what’s the point of reading?

If people must avoid opposing ideas, it means they have no faith in their own beliefs. They can’t defend their thoughts, so their “wuss-out” of the battle of the minds. The reader knows what he believes and has no reason to fear questioning. He goes into battle with his values, without name-calling or censorship. Just truth.

This is how America, the homeland of great readers like Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass, became illiterate. We don’t understand allegory at all. Themes are lost on us. When we read Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” we don’t know what satire is- we come away with torches and pitchforks, claiming Swift is trying to tell us to eat babies.

A child should read children’s books. That is a given. But for the same teenagers who watch The Flavor of Love and play Grand Theft Auto to be banned from reading Hamlet because it depicts death- that’s almost Dystopian.