Utah state legislator Ken Ivory likes burning books, and he's very much into dystopian censorship. He doesn't like calling it that, of course, as he indicated in an opinion piece published Aug. 23 in the Deseret News. He implied we're all overreacting to Utah's new legislation banning books from public school libraries, and that we wouldn't dare print a description of any of the 13 banned books. It was all vulgar pornography, and damaging to kids.

He's lying to us. To illustrate that, I'd like to point to Craig Thompson's masterpiece Blankets, which made the list of publications banned from Utah's schools. This is an important book—and doubly important to have in the hands of teenagers who might be going through the same types of crises it depicts.

Blankets is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel about a young man growing up in an Evangelical community. His parents are poor and abusive; he's been sexually abused as a kid, though this behavior is not drawn explicitly. But he's devoted to Christianity despite the torments of his life—constant bullying, low self-esteem, and the trauma of an unsafe childhood. Many of these are things I lived through. It's probably hard for Ivory to imagine that these things happen in Utah's own hyper-religious communities, but I'd like to assure him that they do.

In Blankets, teenage Craig meets a girl from another state named Raina at church camp, where they fall in love, and subsequently maintain a relationship through letters and phone calls. In one brief scene, Craig masturbates onto a sheet of paper (the scene does not explicitly show genitalia), and throws it away, ashamed. He assures the reader this is the only time he masturbated during his senior year, and it's juxtaposed with him going to church. He's confused by this compulsion, and tries using religion to understand his feelings. Sounds like something a lot of kids in Utah might be going through, right?

Craig convinces his parents to let him visit Raina during a school break, and since her parents are also good Christians, they agree. Craig and Raina have a fairly chaste visit—Raina convinces Craig to sleep in her bed, they cuddle with their shirts off, and we see (illustrated) bare breasts, but they don't have sex. Craig returns home, and they struggle through a long-distance relationship, eventually breaking up. Craig then wrestles with his feelings about his faith, as his trauma and his experience with Raina shape him into a person able to emerge from the hell of his childhood.

Kids need that message: That they can survive those things. I suffered a lot of abuse during my own adolescent years, and didn't encounter Blankets until I was an adult and owned a comic book store in Orem in the early 2000s. I felt like it was speaking directly to me. I've owned half a dozen copies over the past two decades, because I repeatedly end up handing it out to friends and family. It's the sort of thing that brings hope to people who don't know how to navigate those choppy waters, and might not have help available at home. That's exactly why it's so important to keep it in high school libraries.

So you can understand my confusion and shock when I found it on the banned-books list. When did we stop trusting librarians to curate books for kids in our schools, like they're trained to do? And what do we do when the parent who's supposed to "know best" is the actual problem?

Ivory says that we need to protect children from material that exacerbates issues of mental health for kids experiencing familial disintegration—except that Blankets is a salve on that exact wound. Either he hasn't read it, or he doesn't understand how reading works, and how it can help kids navigate personal traumas. To say Blankets is "damaging" would be to ignore the idea that damage has already been done to those who might seek it out in the first place. The idea that it's vulgar spits in the face of our humanity and the struggles of temptation, biology and the confusing cognitive dissonance that religion asks us to grapple with.

I wouldn't hesitate to hand Blankets to any teenager. Why it would need to be hidden from Utah's teens is beyond me, and likely beyond any reasonable adult who has read it. I just did exactly what Ivory said we couldn't do—describe the content of this book in specific detail—and I don't think his objections actually have anything to do with sexual content or "protecting" children. I think they have more to do with the fact that something like Blankets might open a kid's eyes to a future where they could see themselves leaving an abusive situation behind. For him, maybe that's a bridge too far.

In any case, until these lawmakers come to their senses or are thrown out of office, Blankets is available at local comic book stores and public libraries. Buy a copy. Better yet, buy two, and give one to a kid who needs it. Thanks to the Utah legislature, there are lot more out there than there otherwise would have been.