Word: antiporn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Phone companies contend that state regulations prevent them from censoring messages carried over their wires, and many courts have agreed, striking down various efforts to restrict the services. But there have been two rulings that give hope to the antiporn forces. In Arizona and Florida cases, federal appeals courts drew a distinction: government action against dial-a-porn might violate the First Amendment, they said, but as a matter of private policy, phone companies could turn away purveyors of such services...
...impresario? None other than Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, who staged the display as part of a campaign against pornography. Dubbed "Pasqua's Sex Shop" by the press, the antiporn program quickly backfired. An uncooperative President Franois Mitterrand declared that he opposed "all forms of censorship," and former Culture Minister Jack Lang pointedly sent along an erotic engraving by Picasso to be included in the show...
...Fundamentalist Christians seized control of the Polk County Republican convention. Iowa Governor Terry Branstad penciled in child- porn laws as one of his top legislative priorities for 1986. The legislature responded by passing a bill that makes it a crime to purchase child porn. The trickle-down theory of antiporn was in evidence when a planned fund-raising softball game south of Des Moines, featuring a group of Playboy Bunnies and Rabbits, was canceled after phone calls to the local athletic booster club protested that the game would be promoting pornography...
Dworkin and MacKinnon have been pushing antiporn legislation framed as ways to protect the civil rights of women. One such bill passed the Minneapolis city council twice, but was vetoed each time by the mayor. A similar ordinance, passed in Indianapolis, was declared unconstitutional by a federal appeals court, a decision upheld in February by the Supreme Court. An uneasy alliance of Women Against Pornography and right-wing groups supported the legislation. Prominent feminists such as Friedan, Kate Millett and Rita Mae Brown opposed it, and the National Organization for Women avoided taking a position. The Meese Commission recommended hearings...
...court's latest actions will hardly dampen official antiporn efforts. Indeed, as part of the ongoing work of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, Edwin Meese last week approved a new $100,000 study of porn's antisocial impact. But the court did seem to signal what it believes is a constitutional approach. As UCLA Law Professor Henry McGee describes it, the emerging doctrine appears to be "If people want it, they can have it. But they shouldn't subject everyone else...