 I guess ever since I was a kid, and my grandmother and I used to get the pilot, which was the Catholic newspaper, and we would scour the newspaper to see what films we were forbidden to see, and check off what we'd already seen and make our plans for the weekend. So ever since then, I've been interested in how people ban things and why. I thought originally I was going to maybe read something from a lesbian of color, since that would be me, but it's interesting how you suppress writing. And one of the ways that lesbians of color have been suppressed is by denying them publication, or only publishing one of them, like that would be me. So I ended up feeling like I wanted to read something which was at the heart of banning, which is a fear of change, a fear of challenge, which is why things get banned or suppressed. And that's why I picked the thorough, because it seemed very apropos to today's perilous times after having seen the effects of us allowing Republicans to hijack our presidency, and then seeing us allowing the Republicans again to attempt to hijack our governorship, we need to pay close attention, particularly as the war goes on. This is a civil disobedience written in 1849. Must the citizen ever for a moment or in least degree resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man desirable to cultivate a respect for the law so much as for the right? The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience, but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with conscience, and you can read men here as all of us included. Law never made men a wit more just, and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder monkey, and all marching in admirable order over hill and dale to wars against their wills, I against their common sense and conscience, which makes it a very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned. They are peaceably inclined. Now what are they, men at all, or small movable forts and magazines at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? At the navy yard and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, a mere shadow, a reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniment. The reason I came to know Thoreau was when Martin Luther King originally mentioned him when I was a teenager and referred to this piece, Civil Disobedience, and King's words were, I became convinced that non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as his cooperation with good. Thank you.