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

right to vote at any election for the choice of electors... is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age... or in any way abridged

... the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. ” (Emphasis added. ) In other words; when states deny any man the right to vote in federal or state elections, the Fourteenth Amendment is violated. The Fourteenth Amendment, by express language, declined to extend this equality right, the right to vote, to any women. The Nineteenth Amendment, which extended the franchise to women, was passed in 1920.

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Pornography and Civil Rights

part of the bill designed to prohibit race discrimination in hiring practices. (Women were not included in the public-accommodations protections in 1964 or 1968. ) This segregationist

amendment adding sex was passed only because the Civil

Rights Act could not be passed without it.

The segregationist amendment was a serious effort to defeat

the bill. It outraged liberal Congressmen who wanted the

1964 Civil Rights Act to pass. It was intended to be—and was

taken as—a massive and foul insult to Black people and to

those in Congress who favored integration. It was widely regarded as a moral obscenity that demeaned the whole concept of civil rights.

The insult of the amendment was: saying Blacks could be

equal with whites was like saying women could be equal with

men, a transparent absurdity. The insult was: the inequality

between Blacks and whites and especially the incapacities of

Blacks were as natural, as normal, as biologically inevitable,

as divinely ordained, as the inequality between the sexes and

especially the incapacities of women. The insult was: Blacks,

like women, are by nature servile and infantile; trying to elevate Blacks to some other level would be like trying to elevate women (and, by inference, children)—ludicrous, deranged.

On the gut er level, the segregationists had, in effect, gone

from calling those who opposed segregation “niggers” and

“nigger lovers” to calling them all “pussy. ”

The conviction that women could have or should have any

relief from civil inequality played no part in establishing this

first legislative basis for sex discrimination as a violation of

civil rights; and the conviction that women had a right to substantive and honest equality similarly played no role.

Most major advances in sex equality under civil-rights

law—from af irmative action to redress for sexual harassment—have come from litigation, not legislation, though Congress subsequently af irmed a commitment to sex-discrimination law many times, especially in the 1970’s.

Some of the legal rights that feminists regard as fundamental to women’s civil equality have nothing at all to do with civil-rights law or sex discrimination. For instance, the right to

The Meaning of Civil Rights

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abortion is considered a right of privacy under law, not an

equality right. A man’s right to have and use pornography in

his home is protected under the same right of privacy, and the

pornographers have been active in (1) keeping the two rights

legally linked and (2) persuading feminist groups not to

pursue the right to abortion as an issue of sex equality in law.

Also, it is no surprise that civil-rights law has not killed racism. It wounded its most protected social