• Go Ahead and Ban My Book
• I have been rendered “unacceptable.”
• “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves” (Matthew 7:15).
• As people learned to read in ever larger numbers, they read the Bible, and the result was a proliferation of different interpretations. Baptists, Lutherans, Calvinists, Presbyterians, Mennonites, and Methodists are all the descendants of this biblical big bang. Approximately three centuries of bitter and destructive religious wars followed, as well as massacres, excommunications, widespread heresy trials, witchcraft panics, and burnings at the stake, with the usual nasty human-warfare raping, looting, and pillaging stuff thrown in.
• All such collisions are disruptive, especially at first, when the new technology bears an aura of magic and revelation
• Could it be that the board acted under the mistaken belief that The Handmaid’s Tale is anti-Christian?
• So, yes, today’s self-appointed moral gatekeepers can exclude my novel from school libraries, thus making it impossible for students who can’t afford to buy it to read it for free—but as for shutting down the story completely, I’m afraid that horse has left the barn. Has anyone told Madison County about BookTok? That’s the part of TikTok where young people recommend books to one another.
• Here, I would point out that attempts to control media content are as likely to come from the so-called left as from the so-called right, each side claiming to act in the name of the public good.
• That’s why Shakespeare’s characters have to be so inventive with their cursing, and why so many plays are set in the past, and in distant locations such as Venice. This trend continued: The licensing of plays and books in the name of public morality explains much about the 19th-century novel. Sex by implication, but not on the page. Officially, no obscenity, no sedition, no blasphemy. Nothing that would bring a blush to the cheek of an innocent maiden (though there was a great deal of illicit porn).
• Possibly, it has a public-spirited aim. It may have noted the falling birth rate and the surveys showing that young people are losing interest in sex. No sex equals no babies, unless everyone resorts to test tubes. Has sex become too readily available? Banal, even? A boring chore? If so, what better way to make it fascinating again than to prohibit all mention of it? Don’t read about sex! Don’t think about sex! See no sex, hear no sex, speak no sex! Suddenly, the kids want to explore! “Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant” (Proverbs 9:17). If that’s the school board’s game, well played! Virginia may even get more babies out of it.

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• I Invented Gilead. The Supreme Court Is Making It Real.
• based on 17th-century New England Puritan religious tenets and jurisprudence
• Harvard University—an institution that in the 1980s was renowned for its liberalism, but that had begun three centuries earlier chiefly as a training college for Puritan clergy.
• overthrow settled law of 50 years on the grounds that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution, and is not “deeply rooted” in our “history and tradition.”
• Reproductive rights have been the focus of the recent fracas, but only one side of the coin has been visible: the right to abstain from giving birth. The other side of that coin is the power of the state to prevent you from reproducing.
• Thus a “deeply rooted” tradition is that women’s reproductive organs do not belong to the women who possess them. They belong only to the state.
• It ought to be simple: If you believe in “ensoulment” at conception, you should not get an abortion, because to do so is a sin within your religion. If you do not so believe, you should not—under the Constitution—be bound by the religious beliefs of others. But should the Alito opinion become the newly settled law, the United States looks to be well on the way to establishing a state religion. Massachusetts had an official religion in the 17th century. In adherence to it, the Puritans hanged Quakers.

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• But a few years ago, Atwood started plotting a way to continue her 1985 dystopian classic about the women of Gilead, a religious autocracy in what was formerly the United States, where fertile women are subjected to ritualized rape and forced to bear children for the upper class citizens.
• Women dressed as handmaids have flooded Congress and state capitols to protest new restrictions on reproductive rights
• The first generation generally comes with righteous fervor, the second is focused on administration; and the third generation starts to think, What are we doing?
• In the book they go full white supremacy. I give them an out for the show. They make the cast multiracial in the TV series for a few reasons: No. 1, they updated it to now, and No. 2, Hulu has a diversity clause, and No. 3, a show in which everybody was white would be very boring to look at.
• I think using the handmaids’ costume as a protest mechanism is brilliant. You can’t be thrown out, you’re not making a disturbance, and you’re not saying anything, but you’re very visible and everybody knows what you mean. So it has been a brilliant tactic.

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• What does the changing of names achieve in Gilead society? Why do you think Offred tells Nick her old name?
• The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in 1985, yet in recent years it has returned to the bestseller charts and women around the world have donned Handmaid costumes to attend protests against the rolling back of women’s rights. Why do you think the story of Gilead is still so relevant today?