Dr. George Takei (he has two honorary doctorates) has been named honorary chair of Banned Books Week, which is October 5 to 11 this year. In addition to being an actor of considerable fame, and the Internet’s beloved “Uncle George,” Dr. Takei is an author and civil rights activist.

Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week is an annual event that celebrates the freedom to read and marks the efforts of censors to stop other people from reading books they don’t like. The theme for Banned Books Week 2025 reminds us that the right to read belongs to all of us, that censorship has no place in contemporary society, and that we must defend our rights. An allusion to George Orwell’s 1984, this year’s theme is “Censorship is so 1984. Read for your rights.”

Many banned books which are removed from library shelves in one school district are required reading in other school districts. Banning books to stop the ideas in them is futile. Ideas survive. Old battered books, condemned by censors, languish forgotten in someone’s attic, waiting to be rediscovered and read again. Banning a book serves to heighten interest in obtaining the forbidden. We want most what we are arbitrarily told we cannot have.

In the USA, there is no official government agency responsible for banning books. It is done at the local level: school boards and PTAs. but as of 2025, the U. S. government cannot forbid a book to be published, nor seize it off the shelves for burning.

Books are the mirrors of the soul. If we ban the books, we lose insight into our own humanity.” Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer

Why is Banning Books So Bad?

French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvétius , over two hundred years ago, best explained the banning of books: “To limit the press is to limit the nation; to prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.”

Dr. Takei is neither a fool nor a slave, As honorary chair of Banned Books Week, he will endeavor to make sure other Americans are not treated as fools or slaves.

The most important part of the U. S. Constitution is the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees freedom of thought, belief and expression. Not all countries are lucky enough to have such rights granted them and confirmed by law.

The USA’s third president, Thomas Jefferson wrote “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.”

Some books that have been banned in the past include Little Red Riding Hood, Anne Frank’s Diary, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Ernest Hemingway called it foundation of all American literature), the popular Harry Potter series, The Wizard of Oz, Spiegelman’s Maus (despite winning a Pulitzer Prize, Maus has been the subject of localized bans), and too many titles to name. Ironically, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which is about book burning, has been banned several times.

Dr. Takei is the author of They Called Us Enemy and My Lost Freedom: A Japanese American World War II Story, about the way Japanese immigrants and Japanese-American U. S. citizens were treated during WWII, in violation of their constitutional rights. He also co-wrote the space ninja novel, Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe, with the late Robert L. Asprin.

Read for your rights.