Censorship since the early Catholic Church, dictating what you could and couldn't do. The people of the United States looked back on what was being done and expressed that it was wrong for the Church to do such a thing. However, today's leaders seem to be hypocritical on the matter. They say it used to be bad, but today it's good. Censorship is more evident in books today, and the most common ones to be rejected are those that contain obscene language and sexual references. There are many examples of this; however, the few best known ones are: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. Banning books like these blocks the meanings that these mature and experienced authors are proposing to the world. The Catcher in the Rye is a classic novel written by J.D. Salinger that portrays the life of a confused teenager in New York City. . The main character is a teenager who has been a delinquent all his life. Holden Caulfield says, “I forgot to tell you. They kicked me out [of Pencey]” (Salinger 4). The banning of the book begins when Holden begins to behave like the delinquent he has been described as. The book contains a very rich vocabulary of words that are still considered inappropriate today. As stated in Sweet “The Catcher in the Rye is one of the most excluded books from libraries and classrooms, apparently because of its sexually provocative language, but probably because of its alienated and irrelevant attitude to the world” (Sweet 3) . For example, the first strong language begins in the first paragraph of the book. Speaking of the story of his li... middle of paper... parents don't object to sex education any more than they oppose dictionaries, but when it comes to what their teenage sons and daughters read in school , they may prefer to substitute materials that contain highly explicit illustrations or suggestive prose (Sweet 3). The quote says that teenagers get sex education, but that's really just them. From a personal perspective, I was first taught sex education while I was in elementary school. Should society really care about what teenagers read more than what children, whose ages are still in the single digits, learn about sexual relationships? Society should stop worrying about what its children read and instead worry about their progress into adulthood at too early an age. Book banning blocks the meanings these mature, experienced authors offer the world.