https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/07/book-bans-pen-america-censorship

I’m a queer author. Words I never thought would define me—queer or author. And I haven’t taken book banning seriously. It’s been on the back burner… pun intended. What about deportation? What about Musk? What about teenagers controlling our digital lives, mining our data, and reshaping economies with unchecked power? And here is book banning, quietly burning in the background, smoldering under our noses while we’re distracted by the next catastrophe.

I took my eye off it. And now that I look back, it’s not just bad—it’s a fucking wildfire. How can this be happening? Now. Here. In a country that claims to be free?

Why have I not taken this seriously? I’ve assumed—hard part to own—it’s not that big of a deal because I can still buy those books. I can still read them. So really, what is the big deal? But here’s the truth: book bans are about access. They are about who gets to read, who gets to learn, and who gets to decide what stories are told. Yes, I can still buy banned books. But what about the kids who can’t? What about the students who rely on school libraries, the readers who don’t have the money, the access, or even the knowledge that these stories exist?

Why the hell aren’t we more concerned about teaching our kids to think critically, to discern, to question, to sift out the truth from the noise? A generation raised on one sanitized, whitewashed, state-approved narrative is dangerous. How will they recognize truth if we’re too afraid to even let them see the whole picture? How will they wrestle with it if we cut off half of the conversation?

Faith isn’t downloaded. You don’t just wake up brave. Courage isn’t a gift from the sky—it’s a muscle built by facing fear head-on. You find truth by fighting through the lies. You find balance by falling, by failing, by standing up again. Hiding, deleting, or burning uncomfortable realities doesn’t bring us closer to truth—it buries it.

God is found on the margins. In the outcasts. In the voices they want to silence. Scripture tells us this again and again: Jesus didn’t sit at the table with the powerful—he sat with the rejected, the hated, the erased. And yet here we are, snuffing out voices, erasing stories, tightening the leash around what our children are allowed to read, think, question.

Book bans aren’t about protecting children. They’re about controlling them. Keeping them compliant. Keeping them in line. Keeping them from growing into people who question, who push back, who demand more. And history has screamed this lesson at us—when you erase stories, you don’t just erase words. You erase people.

So how do we stop this? We fight back. We read banned books. We buy them for others. We donate them to libraries and free book programs. We show up at school board meetings. We vote for leaders who believe in free thought, in intellectual freedom, in education that doesn’t shy away from hard truths. We refuse to be silent.

I will not be erased. And neither will the stories that terrify them so much they try to burn them out of existence.