lawyers represent the ACLU in public debate and as individuals work for pornographers in private. Their personal incomes, then, are largely dependent on being retained by the pornographers. In public they are spokesmen for high-and-mighty principles; in private, they do whatever the pornographers need done. For instance, one such lawyer represented the ACLU in many debates with feminists on pornography. He
talked about the importance of free speech with serious elegance and would brook no exceptions to what must be protected because, he said repeatedly, if any exceptions were made, “feminist and gay” speech would suffer. Then, as the
private lawyer for a pornographer, he sued Women Against
Pornography for libel because on television a member de
Questions and Answers
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nounced the pornographer for publishing cartoons that por-
nographized children. This is one way the ACLU helps pornographers wage war on feminists: high-toned in public; political destruction in private by use of money, power, and
ACLU lawyers. The ACLU itself also has a record of defending child pornography by opposing any laws against it as constitutionally prohibited incursions on free speech.
The ACLU has also provided money and of ice space for
FACT, a group that cal s itself feminist, opposes the Ordinance,
and defends pornography as a significant expression of women’s
free sexuality. One ACLU staff person was instrumental in
founding FACT and often represents FACT in public while continuing to rise on the ACLU staf . Perhaps the most telling detail, a picture to hold in your mind, is this one: ACLU men and FACT
women sat with representatives of
Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography in New York
City in 1986. Al three factions together heckled a feminist
speaker whose subject was the sexual abuse of women.
The ACLU’s stated commitment is to protect the Bil of
Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, not pornography as such, though it’s hard to tell sometimes. Without a commitment to real equality of the same magnitude as its
commitment to those first ten amendments, the ACLU
defends power, not rights. No mat er how notorious the exploitation, as for instance in child pornography, the ACLU
ends up substantively defending those who exploit the powerless. The ACLU demands a literal reading of those first ten amendments, especially the First Amendment, especially its
speech provision. This is an exceptionally conservative position both philosophically and politically and it has a conservative political outcome: it keeps already established pat erns of inequality intact.
The ACLU has refused to consider the role of sexual abuse
in keeping women silent, or how poverty keeps women,
Blacks, and other minorities from having access to the means
of communication. The ACLU refuses to accept responsibility
for the fact that in the United States speech has to be paid for
in money. The ACLU defends the power of corporations who
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Pornography and Civil Rights
own and control the means of speech against the aspirations
of dissidents who have been excluded from the circle of protected speech by sex or race.
We also frankly abhor the ACLU’s defenses of Klan and
Nazi groups. The ACLU has a long history of protecting the
most virulent racism. In protecting pornography, this purposeful policy continues. Pornography sexualizes racist hatred. It uses racially motivated violation, torture, and
murder as sex acts that lead to orgasm. We believe that racist
pornography is one source of the violence against Blacks and
