About fifteen years ago, a coworker who was a devout Christian wanted me to join an organized protest of a local store that sold pornographic writings.

"It's detrimental to women", she said. "It promotes gender intolerance and it's dangerous."

My first impulse was to jump at the chance. Young and idealistic, I thought that it would be the opportunity to make a statement. It's a black-and-white issue. Pornography is wrong.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the world we live in isn't black-and-white by far. It's a rainbow of colors, ultraviolet to infrared.

So where, exactly, does one draw the line, and who gets to judge when a piece of work has crossed the line and should be censored? It's easy to say that pornography is so blatantly obvious in its reason to be censored. But the truth is that if I believe that pornography is wrong, someone else believes it's right. What about the rights of consenting adults?

And can we stop there? How about abortion? I believe that abortion is wrong, but there are many people in this world who believe it's right. So what if I were to say that any book that was pro-abortion should be banned? How about pro-religion? Anti-religion? Pro-Democrat? Pro-Republican? Ahhh -- therein lies the catch. Those inevitable two sides to every issue.

We could beat that issue until it's dead and then beat it some more. I learned something way more important recently regarding censorship. And that is that it doesn't work. In fact, if anything, it ends up having the opposite effect.

My case in point...

While I worked as a Department Manager at the local Barnes & Noble superstore, I encountered the issue of censorship on a number of occasions and in a number of forms. But one time in particular really stands out.

It was just before Christmas one year. Suddenly, in the midst of requests for expensive gift books and the current bestsellers, a number of people came looking for the book "Bless Me Ultima" by Rudolfo Anaya. Now, being in charge of fiction, I was certainly familiar with the book, but in my three years, I'd only been asked for that particular title once or twice. Suddenly, I had half a dozen people looking for it in one day's time.

Eventually I asked one of the shoppers the burning question. Why? The answer was that one of the local school districts decided that this book was going to be pulled off of its reading list and banned from its library shelves due to its content. Once this was made public, it not only outraged many people, but it made them intensely curious. People that had never heard of the book, people who had never had any interest in reading it, were suddenly dying to have a copy. They suddenly had to read this book.

In the process, they got many of the bookstore employees interested. Why would someone want to ban this book? What was it about this particular book? So, a number of employees purchased the book, too. I placed an order for a dozen copies, so that I could stock my shelves, in addition to the special orders I placed for individual customers. Many, many people went home that December to read this book.

Thanks to being censored, this book suddenly surged in popularity. Had the censors thought about this? Maybe. Maybe not. But regardless, they managed to completely defeat their own purpose.

This incident taught me something about censorship. It's not only pointless. Maybe it's not truly possible.

Did you know that -- at least at bookstores -- there's a Banned Book Week? One bookstore that I know about celebrated this by doing a display in its front window. They covered the entire storefront in black paper. At intervals, there were cutouts in the black paper, and through the cutouts, copies of books were visible. Featured were books that were -- at one time or another -- banned from shelves somewhere.

Ironic, isn't it?