Word: mackinnon
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...Pornography currently has more protection than women do," MacKinnon told the statehouse committee considering the Massachusetts bill. In corroboration, several witnesses gave chilling testimony of being sexually abused by husbands and boyfriends who admitted that they had been prompted by porn films or magazines. Fighting back tears, Pat Haas, of Brookline, Mass., said she had been beaten by her boyfriend, who forced her to act out scenes from pornography. "He did what was in the movies," says Haas. "If he had seen a snuff film, I wouldn't be here." Under the proposed antipornography civil rights bill, victims like Haas...
...A.C.L.U. opposes the Massachusetts initiative for much the same reason it argued against previous MacKinnon-Dworkin bills. Pornography no doubt causes harm, says Burt Neuborne, the union's former national legal director. But to suppress it, under First Amendment rules, "you have to show, in addition to the harm, that there is no other societal way of dealing with a problem than censorship. Here, the current bills fail...
...MacKinnon, Dworkin and the A.C.L.U. all have qualms about the Senate's so- called Bundy bill, although for different reasons. The two feminists contend that since the proposed legislation narrowly bans only "obscenity" -- which is not protected by the First Amendment, courts have ruled -- this restriction may prove to be legally counterproductive. "If pornography is excessively violent," Dworkin explains, "very often a jury will find that it's not obscene because it's not sexually arousing...
...MacKinnon and Dworkin believe theirs is an idea whose time has come at last. As evidence, they can cite last month's unanimous ruling by Canada's Supreme Court -- endorsing MacKinnon's argument -- that pornography harmful to women can be outlawed even though freedom of expression is infringed. Cass Sunstein, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, notes that the courts have carved out numerous exceptions to the First Amendment; for example, it does not protect bribes, fraud, threats or conspiracy...
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...