Since writing was invented in about 3000 BC, people have expressed their thoughts in written form. The battle with censors has been ongoing. From the death of Socrates, in 399 BC (for teaching the youth of Athens to think for themselves) to the 1981 burning of the New Living Bible in Gastonia, North Carolina (because it is "a perverted commentary of the King James Version" of the Bible), history tells us about secular and ecclesiastical authorities who tried to kill the products of free thought. Some of the people who created those ideas were executed. But in America, we have the First Amendment. It guarantees our cherished legal rights and protects both the process and the people.

Do we have censorship in America? Yes. Mark Twain's Huck Finn was been banned countless times from 1885 to 1986. In 1933, a U.S. Customs official impounded an art history text of the Sistine Chapel because it had "lewd pictures" in it. Unbelievably, even the Diary of Anne Frank, written by a young teenager ultimately exterminated at Bergen Belsen, was recommended for rejection in 1983 because it is a "real downer." We have censorship in America. That is why first amendment protection of free thought and expression is as important today as it was when the Bill of Rights was first written.

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