What do "Catcher in the Rye," "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "A Wrinkle in Time," "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," "Lord of the Flies," "Slaughterhouse Five," "One Hundred Years of Solitude," and "Little Red Riding Hood" have in common?

They're all among the United States' 50 most-frequently banned books of the 1990s.

Welcome to Banned Books Week 1999 — "Free People Read Freely." Sponsored by a wide variety of groups — including the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association and the American Society of Journalists and Authors — Banned Book Week runs Sept. 25 through Oct. 2 and celebrates our right as Americans to read without censorship.

It may seem silly in this day and age to fight book bans. After all, nobody's burning books in the street. The Comstock Laws — which prohibit "obscene materials" in the U.S. mail and effectively banned such books as "The Canterbury Tales" and Boccaccio's "Decameron" — are now unenforced, although they remain, for the most part, on the books. Such Internet merchants as amazon.com and bn.com make it possible to acquire almost any book imaginable.

Besides, those who attempt to ban books usually have the best of intentions — they want to protect others (usually children) from information, language or ideas they consider inappropriate.

But as John Stuart Mill, a far more eloquent spokesman than I, said in "On Liberty": "If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. … If the opinion [of the one man] is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."

Censorship is the tool of the weak, the cowardly and the afraid. Those who hold the truth should have no fear of seeing it challenged. Censorship does not protect a community but indeed makes it more vulnerable, unable to defend its beliefs, unwilling to expose itself to foreign ideas. Such a community becomes far more bigoted through its own actions than it ever could by reading the "n-word" in "Huck Finn."

We do ourselves and our children no service by denying access to ideas we dislike. Refusing to allow young adults to read "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" because it features descriptions of the author's sexual abuse as a child will not make sexual abuse go away. It will merely rob our teenagers of tools and viewpoints they could use to face sexual abuse and keep them from entering a mature discussion in the home or school.

"Leave of Grass" was considered obscene. "Little Red Riding Hood" involves a minor transporting alcohol (this is the true reason it was banned in some California school districts in 1989). "Of Mice and Men" has offensive language. The Declaration of Independence was treason. Yet can we imagine our cultural landscape without these works? Should they be censored merely because some find them offensive? Banned because some disagree? Kept out of our hands because some find them immoral?

Free people read freely.

Only cowards turn to censorship.

• Free people read freely