You're welcome, G- !!!
hologirl2 wrote:
Hey Maggie, Can you give me more information on this specific mention in this interview with Dworkin you sent me. Like an article with the names and dates of the people involved. I have some friends who defend the ACLU who may be shocked by this.
I, Maggie, wrote:
Quote from document cited above:
The ACLU has been very active in defending the pornographers in the media. The ACLU has been very active in defending pornography as a genre of expression that must have absolute constitutional protection: this they have done in the courts.
The ACLU has taken money for a long time from the pornographers. Some money has been raised by showing pornography. The ACLU's economic ties with the pornographers take many different forms, ranging from taking money from the Playboy Foundation to being housed for a nominal rent ($1 per year) in a building owned by pornographers. Sometimes 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 denounced the pornographer for publishing cartoons that pornographized 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 office space for FACT, a group that calls itself feminist, opposes the Ordinance, and defends pornography as a significant expression of free sexuality. One ACLU staff person was instrumental in founding FACT and often represents FACT in public while continuing to rise on the ACLU staff. Perhaps the most telling detail, a picture to hold in your mind, is this one: ACLU men and FACT women sat with representatives of Penthouse at a meeting of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography in New York City in 1986. All three factions together heckled a feminist speaker whose subject was the sexual abuse of women.
The ACLU's stated commitment is to protect the Bill 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 matter 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 patterns 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 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 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 Bill 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.
G-, the above quote is an excerpt of the section "Questions and Answers" in the little Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance book
Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality (1988), which is now out of print but available online at
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin ... ay/TOC.htm
I hope it helps you.
Take care,
Maggie.