Touchy? Tell me about it! Literally. Write your story. Why should there be one rule for Salman Rushdie and another rule for us?

McCarthyism was finally broken, thanks in no small part to the novels that exposed the paranoid paradox of the USA becoming a Stalinist state to defeat the USSR - despite the inevitability of attracting suspicion, driven by that very paranoia, that the authors themselves were traitors on the Kremlin's payroll.

If your story shows that persecution driven by fear, hate, and ignorance is not only cruel but also illogical, and damaging and destructive to everyone, that's a message we all need to hear. People who read it will get that you're no more a racist than George Michael is a Trappist monk.

By definition, there is nothing you can write to please people who burn your book without bothering to read it first. But if they bully you into not writing it in the first place, or block other people from reading and reviewing your WIP and helping you, and get away with it, the only winners will be the censorious bigots who dictate what writers may or may not write about, and what readers may or may not read.