Welcome to banned book week, week of the banned books, week of rebels, readers of rebellion. This is the week passionate readers come together to celebrate books and live in freedom with them. It is when people overlook censorship and read what they want because they want to.   One book that is currently being challenged is Speak, written by Laurie Halse Anderson.  A parent in Republic, Missouri, Wes Scroggins, is challenging this book and two others like it, calling them “soft-pornography.”  “Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them,” said Anderson on the matter. Scroggins has a right to disagree with the books and to challenge them, but there is no justice in preventing others from reading them: actually banning them. According the the American Library Association (ALA),  the books that have been challenged from 1995-2009 have mostly been challenged by parents. Parents should have a right to control what their children are reading, but when it comes to other people’s children and schools and whole communities, that control should be reduced to an influence. “Library users have a personal choice about what they read, and that choice should not be taken away by another,” said Head of Youth Services at the Wichita Falls Public Library Kathy Vossler. “The freedom to read and to react and respond to literature is a critically important human right,” said Wichita Falls Public Library Administrator Lesley Daly. One of our first amendment rights is the freedom to speech. No one is saying books such as Speak should not be written, but with that first amendment right is the right to embrace speech. If such books are going to be disallowed in school systems and public libraries, half of the freedom of speech is taken away, which is in fact unconstitutional. Boom, roasted. Don’t ban books. Read books.