Word: antiporn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Neither Carnegie Mellon nor the Georgetown Law Journal has officially backed away from the study (it was allegedly placed by a Journal editor who is an antiporn crusader; the university is also forming an investigative committee). Rimm's faculty adviser, Marvin Sirbu, a professor of engineering and public policy, continues to support him, saying the research has been deliberately mischaracterized by people with a political agenda. But Sirbu himself has been attacked by Carnegie Mellon colleagues for not properly supervising his student and for helping him secretly gather data about the pornography-viewing habits of the university's students. Meanwhile...
...Justice Department, for its part, has not asked for new antiporn legislation. Distributing obscene material across state lines is already illegal under federal law, and child pornography in particular is vigorously prosecuted. Some 40 people in 14 states were arrested two years ago in Operation Longarm for exchanging kiddie porn online. And one of the leading characters in the Carnegie Mellon study--a former Rand McNally executive named Robert Copella, who left book publishing to make his fortune selling pedophilia on the networks--was extradited from Tijuana, and is now awaiting sentencing in a New Jersey jail...
True enough, First Amendment defenders answer, but the MacKinnon-Dworkin approach may be a cure worse than the disease. On dubious evidence, they say, the antiporn bills take aim at a secondary cause of female subordination and ignore the reality that woman-hating psychopaths have more often cited the Bible as inspiration. Beyond that, advocates of the antiporn bills seem blithely indifferent to the crippling cultural impact of legislation that places so much emphasis on the subjective views of crime victims. Porn, like beauty, may be in the beholder's eye. But it is a bad perspective for building good...