A woman named Clare Booth Luce said, “Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there.”
It’s a good philosophy, and one we could all adopt—there’s no need to allow things to which you object into your homes, but there’s no need to try to say the world at large should be disallowed to have them. But sometimes censorship seems so reasonable that some of us accept it, or even encourage it.
Take for example the recent conflicts revolving around papers in Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain publishing a series of cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The newspaper France Soir first stated that it choose to print the cartoons “to show ‘religious dogma’ had no place in a secular society”, but after the riots erupted they sacked their managing editor.
Having reviewed the cartoons in question, I do feel like they are in poor taste—the story of Muhammad universally tell of a man didn’t ostracize other faiths, but rather told he was sent by god to complete the teachings—but are crass cartoons enough to fire people, start riots, and set fire to things? If you don’t like it, I say, you can retaliate in kind: write a letter or publish a cartoon. Don’t let it in your home. Don’t censor it.
Censorship is the act of cowards.
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Robert Peary took it to the North Pole. There’s a song in its honor. It makes smiles sparkle. It’s used to coat the feet of vending machines to keep pests out. It controls unruly hair. People put it on chickens to prevent frostbite. It protects baby’s bottoms, and is invaluable to virgins. A tycoon swore eating a spoonful a day helped him live to see 96 years, and odds are that you have some in your home. It’s Vaseline.
A young boy peered into the dissection room at New York Hospital in post-colonial Manhattan only to see medical student John Hicks, Jr. pick up a corpse’s arm and wave it at him. Hicks then shouted, “This is your mother’s hand. I just dug it up. Watch it or I’ll smack you with it!” The frightened boy ran into the April night believing every word the student had said because his mother had died a few days before.
As you read this sentence, six grown adults are spending their waking and sleeping hours pretending they are on Mars. For several weeks they will live in a two-story mockup of a spaceship parked in the Utah desert, don spacesuits to explore the territory around the base, and labor under the apparent delusion that they are 150 million miles away. 
Imagine if you discovered one day that two of your three children were genetically not yours. Recriminations, marital troubles, perhaps a divorce, right? Now add a twist. What if you were these children’s mother? Suddenly the question becomes not “Who?” but rather “Huh?”
Scientists have discovered the world’s smallest fish in the threatened swampland of Indonesia. It’s called Paedocypris Progenetica, a distant member of the carp family, and when fully grown it’s the size of a large mosquito.
Roswell, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T…. These words bring up images of little green men, flying saucers, and a funky little alien with heartburn. For years, we have heard about the secret “Blue Book” the government kept, logging all its information about UFOs and related material. 
On July 25th, 2001 a strange rain began to fall over Kerala, India. For three months intermittent reports of colored rains came in from a several hundred kilometer long strip of coastal India. Just prior to the first reported cases of red rains, reports of sonic booms in the Kerala region suggested that perhaps a comet or asteroid had disintegrated high in the atmosphere, a phenomenon known as an airburst. Two scientists, Godfrey Louis and A. Santhosh Kumar, collected samples of the red rain and reported that the red coloration came from some unidentified particle which showed biological activity. Did Louis and Kumar uncover the first hard evidence of alien life here on Earth?