Pornography Through the Looking Glass

By Charles Krauthammer

Television ushered in the new year by cracking what it breathlessly billed as "the last taboo": incest. Liberal Minneapolis celebrated by backtracking a couple of taboos and considering a ban on pornography. One would have thought that that particular hang-up had been overcome. But even though the ban voted by the Minneapolis city council was eventually vetoed by Mayor Donald Fraser, pornography is evidently a hang-up of considerable tenacity. And according to the proposed law it is more than that: it is a violation of civil rights.

Now that seems like a peculiar notion, but one has to read the proposed ordinance to see just how peculiar it is. The city council proposed banning "discrimination... based on race, color, creed, religion, ancestry, national origin, sex, including ...

pornography." What can that possibly mean? How can one discriminate based on pornography?

Anticipating such questions, the bill helpfully provides "special findings on pornography." If it ever passes (immediately after the mayor's veto proponents vowed to bring it up again), the findings are destined to be the most famous gifts from social science to law since footnote eleven of Brown vs. Board of Education.* The Brown findings, however, were based on real empirical data. The Minneapolis findings are of a more metaphysical nature. They begin: "The council finds that pornography is central in creating and maintaining the civil inequality of the sexes." If that were true, then it would follow that where pornography is banned--as in the U.S. of 50 years ago or the Tehran of today--one should not expect to find civil inequality of the sexes. Next finding. "Pornography is a systematic practice of exploitation and subordination based on sex which differentially harms women." While it is true that some pornography subordinates women, some does not, and none is "systematic" or a "practice." Outside the Minneapolis city council chambers, pornography means the traffic in obscenity. Inside, as in Alice's Wonderland, words will mean what the council wants them to mean.

The liberal mayor of Minneapolis was sympathetic with the proposal's aims, but vetoed it nonetheless. He found it too vague and ambiguous, a classic complaint against obscenity laws, old and new. In simpler times Justice Potter Stewart answered the question what is pornography with a succinct "I know it when I see it." But would even he know "subordination based on sex which differentially harms women" when he saw it? After all, the new dispensation seems to exclude homosexual pornography. And only embarrassment, not logic, would prevent including those weddings at which the bride is old-fashioned enough to vow "to love, honor and obey."

The head of the Minneapolis Civil Liberties Union says, unkindly, that the ordinance "has no redeeming social value." That seems a bit harsh. Set aside for a moment the pseudo findings, the creative definitions, the ambiguities. The intent of the bill is to do away with the blight of pornography. What can be wrong with that?

A good question, and an important one. Over the decades it has spawned a fierce debate between a certain kind of conservative (usually called cultural conservative) on the one hand and civil libertarians on the other. The argument went like this. The conservative gave the intuitive case against pornography based on an overriding concern for, it now sounds almost too quaint to say, public morality. Pornography is an affront to decency; it coarsens society. As Susan Sontag, not a conservative, writing in defense of pornography says, it serves to "drive a wedge between one's existence as a full human being and one's existence as a sexual being." The ordinary person, of course, does not need a philosopher, conservative or otherwise, to tell him why he wants to run pornography out of his neighborhood. It cheapens and demeans. Even though he may occasionally be tempted by it, that temptation is almost invariably accompanied by a feeling of shame and a desire to shield his children from the fleshy come-ons of the magazine rack.

That may be so, say the civil libertarians, but it is irrelevant. Government has no business regulating morality. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression, and though you may prefer not to express yourself by dancing naked on a runway in a bar, some people do, and you have no business stopping them.

Nor do you have any business trying to stop those who like to sit by the runway and imbibe this form of expression. It may not be Swan Lake, but the First Amendment does not hinge on judgments of artistic merit or even redeeming value.

Now this traditional debate over pornography is clear and comprehensible. It involves the clash of two important values:

public morality vs. individual liberty. The conservative is prepared to admit that his restrictions curtail liberty, though a kind of liberty he does not think is particularly worth having. The civil libertarian admits that a price of liberty is that it stands to be misused, and that pornography may be one of those misuses; public morality may suffer, but freedom is more precious. Both sides agree, however, that one cannot have everything and may sometimes have to trade one political good for another.

Not the Minneapolis bill, and that is what made it so audacious--and perverse. It manages the amazing feat of restoring censorship, which after all is a form of coercion, while at the same time claiming not to restrict rights but expand them.

The logic is a bit tortuous. It finds that pornography promotes bigotry and fosters acts of aggression against women, both of which, in turn, "harm women's opportunities for equality of rights in employment, education, property rights,...contribute significantly to restricting women from full exercise of citizenship . . . and undermine women's equal exercise of rights to speech and action."

Apart from the questionable logical leaps required at every step of the syllogism, the more immediate question is: Why take this remote and improbable route to arrive at a point--banning pornography--that one can reach directly by citing the venerable argument that pornography damages the moral fiber of society? Why go from St.

Paul to Minneapolis by way of Peking?

The answer is simple. As a rallying cry, public morality has no sex appeal; civil rights has. Use words like moral fiber and people think of Jerry Falwell. Use words like rights and they think of Thomas Jefferson. Use civil rights and they think of Martin Luther King Jr. Because civil rights is justly considered among the most sacred of political values, appropriating it for partisan advantage can be very useful. (The fiercest battle in the fight over affirmative action, for example, is over which side has rightful claim to the mantle of civil rights.) Convince people that censorship is really a right, and you can win them over. It won over the Minneapolis city council. And if to do so, you have to pretend that fewer rights are more, so be it.

Civil rights will not be the first political value to have its meaning reversed. The use of the term freedom to describe unfreedom goes back at least as far as Rousseau, who wrote, without irony, of an ideal republic in which men would be "forced to be free." In our day, the word democracy is so beloved of tyrants that some have named their countries after it, as in the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany). And from Beirut to San Salvador, every gang of political thugs makes sure to kneel at least five times a day in the direction of "peace." So why not abuse civil rights?

The virtue of calling a spade a spade is that when it is traded in, accountants can still make sense of the books. The virtue of calling political values by their real names is that when social policy is to be made, citizens can make sense of the choices. That used to be the case in the debate about pornography. If Minneapolis is any indication of where that debate is heading, it will not be the case for long.

That is a pity, because while it is easy to quarrel with the method of the Minneapolis ban, it is hard to quarrel with the motive.

After a decade's experience with permissiveness, many Americans have become acutely aware that there is a worm in the apple of sexual liberation. That a community with a reputation for liberalism should decide that things have gone too far is not really news. The call for a pause in the frantic assault on the limits of decency (beyond which lies the terra cognita of what used to be taboos) is the quite natural expression of a profound disappointment with the reality, as opposed to the promise, of unrestricted freedom. There are pushes and pulls in the life of the national superego, and now there is a pulling--back. Many are prepared to make expression a bit less free in order to make their community a bit more whole, or, as skeptics might say, wholesome.

That is nothing to be ashamed of. So why disguise it as a campaign for civil rights? (True, liberals may be somewhat embarrassed to be found in bed with bluenoses, but the Minneapolis case is easily explained away as a one-issue marriage of convenience.) In an age when the most private of human activities is everywhere called by its most common name, why be so coy about giving censorship its proper name too? --By Charles Krauthammer

The Supreme Court's 1954 ruling cited seven scholars to prove that separate-but-equal schooling harmed black children, and led one critic to complain that it thus needlessly gave ammunition to those who wished to see the Brown decision not as an expression of civilized truth but as a brand of sociology.