As my wise friend Anna Marie once said, soon just selling books will be a crime

A new Indiana law forces bookstores selling any book that falls under the broadly defined and yet difficult to categorize heading of 'sexually explicit' to pay a $250 license fee and be classified as an adult bookstore.

In Oregon, publishers, booksellers, and the ACLU are still fighting to repeal the law that books that fall under the broadly defined and yet difficult to categorize heading of 'sexually explicit' cannot be sold to anyone under the age of 13.

I could go into a long diatribe about censorship.

I could go into a long diatribe about the consequences (and futility) of sexual repression.

But instead, I am going to thank my parents, who never once told me what I could and could not read. From my earliest days as a reader and book lover, I have been given free reign, not only in the library, but also my parent's bookshelves. I remember vividly looking though the coffee table book about Marilyn Monroe and staring at some of her famous nudes. I also remember the most affecting aspect of those photographs to me was the porcelain aspect of her skin, which was so different from anyone in my olive and pink-toned family.

Any book I could pull off the shelf was mine to peruse. Any book I wanted to check out of the library was mine to read. My world, whether I lived in a small town or large city, was always immediately expansive, filled with young women who created shelter out of whale bones, and girl detectives in upstate New York far cooler than Nancy Drew. As I entered my 'tween' years, my world grew exponentially to include seedy apartments in New Orleans, the parch dusty plains of Kansas, the killing fields of Dresden, Apartheid South Africa, and Regency England. And I entered my adolescence aware of the boundless universe encompassing not only space, but history and future, as well as worlds that don't even exist.

Thank you, Mom and Dad, for allowing me the space to find out what kind of reader I wanted to be (omnivorous). Thank you for trusting my ability to process anything others may consider too adult, too explicit, too anything for me, and for knowing I would come to you if I had any questions. Thank you for reading to me. Thank you for having books in the house and taking us to the library wherever we lived. Thank you for encouraging questions and also for leaving me alone, because you knew I liked to figure things out on my own.

You are awesome and I am blessed.