Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality

other minorities that is ongoing in this society. We believe that

it is a dynamic source of racist violence.

The pornographers rank with Nazis and Klansmen in promoting hatred and violence. Their targets are always sex-based and sometimes race-based. Like the Nazis and the

Klansmen, they commit the acts of violence they promote.

They conduct a war against women that spreads terror.

We have asked the ACLU repeatedly over many years to

protect the rights enumerated in the Bil of Rights by taking

the cases of powerless or disenfranchised people, not exploiters, abusers, or purveyors of genocide. The ACLU has remained indifferent to this idea.

Q: But, under the Ordinance, won’t gay and lesbian materials be the first to go?

A: In some places, under obscenity laws, graphic sexually explicit materials presenting homosexual sex acts are made illegal perse. The Ordinance does not do this. The Ordinance requires proof of actual harm before any materials can be found illegal. The harm cannot be a moral one—say, that someone

is of ended by the materials or believes they are not proper

family entertainment or finds that they violate their religious

beliefs. The harm proven must be a harm of coercion, assault,

defamation, or traf icking in sex-based subordination. The

fact that the participants in the sex acts shown are of the same

sex is not itself a form of sex-based subordination. Only materials that can be proven harmful can be reached, and only by Questions and Answers

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their victims, not by the government. The particular question

of lesbian and gay materials under the Ordinance then becomes: if any lesbian or gay material can be proven to do harm to direct victims, is there a good reason that it ought to be exempt under the Ordinance simply because the materials show gay or lesbian sex?

Al pornography, from Playboy to “Snuff, ” is part of somebody’s sexuality, their authentic sexuality as they understand it. Their pornography is a sexual experience; it is sex to them.

Not surprisingly, these same people want to be reassured that

their favorite pornography is exempt from the Ordinance.

For example, when men say, You can’t mean Playboy! they are

saying, I use it, I enjoy it, I have a right to it, you are not going

to take it away from me, I don’t care whom it hurts. This

simply means, because I like it, nobody should be able to do

anything about it. It is special pleading pure and simple.

There is necessarily someone who feels this way about every

part of the Ordinance’s definition of pornography.

The broader question the Ordinance poses, then, is, Does

anyone have a right to materials that are produced through

coercion, that wil be forced on others, that are the cause of

assaults, that defame individuals, and that are integral to the

second-class status of half the population? Is anyone's sexuality—however conventional or unconventional, however sincere—more important than the lives that must be, wil be, ground up and spit out in little pieces in the making and use

of the pornography so that the consumer’s sexuality can be

provided with what it needs, wants, or enjoys? Is the sexuality

of the pedophile more important than the freedom from

sexual exploitation of the child? Is the sexuality of the woman

hater more important than the freedom from sexual slavery

of the woman coerced to model for sadomasochistic pornography? for forced fellatio? Is the sexuality of the nice but lonely guy more important than the unequal life chances of

all the women whose lives are endangered, made hollow, reduced a little or reduced a lot, because what he wants he gets?