Parents want to ban "Fahrenheit 451"

The book, written by Ray Bradbury, is almost universally viewed as one of the great commentaries on book banning and the suppression of free thought, although Bradbury says that at the time he wrote it he was thinking more of how television was destroying reading habits.

Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib / Republican, Mattachine / FourSquareGospel feel it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse….Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by the minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the library closed forever.

... Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony... [Ballantine] is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.

What the parents in Texas are complaining about are the "damns" and "hells," references to drinking, cigarettes, and beer (!), and a negative view of firemen (!!!). Fortunately the students at the school are more enlightened than the parents and are signing petitions to have the book retained.