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Comment by claudiawerner | Hacker News Reader

I have no particular horse in this race, but it's worth noting that quite a few legal scholars have designed proposals or at least theorized under what conditions pornography could be illegalized with a First Amendment friendly law[0]. I don't know how successful their proposals are from my POV as a layperson.

Some philosophers have also suggested that even if there are good reasons for protecting the availability of porn, it may not count as speech from the POV of the philosophy of rights - it is simply too unlike other forms of speech to count. I think their arguments are at least worth considering.

[0] https://gould.usc.edu/students/journals/rlsj/issues/assets/d...

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I could barely make it past the title without objecting on principle. There's a quote below the title:

> If true equality between male and female persons is to be achieved, we cannot ignore the threat to equality resulting from exposure to materials portraying women as objects for sexual exploitation and abuse.

So exposure to this stuff is a "threat" which I presume they intend to combat. The implication being what people are allowed to expose themselves to is supposed to be regulated. This is advocating for censorship and I will never agree with that on principle.

I kept reading that document and saw several insinuations that pornography causes a lot of things, including rape and violence against women. Yeah, I'm not sure about that. Sounds a lot like so many similar claims like video games cause violence and school shootings or rap music causes violence.

Again, I make no claim as to the merit; however, to dismiss these claims out of hand without looking at the evidence first, even if the article contains hyperbole, does not do the claim justice. Suppose, for the sake of argument that the author is right about the empirical statements on pornography; in that case, there may well be a 1A-friendly case for at least a temporary ban on porn. That was the only point I was making.

If I assume the author is right, then yes, I agree that there could be a case. The thing is the arguments used didn't exactly inspire that assumption. I've seen those arguments before.

As for the evidence, I checked many of the references cited and I saw lots of quotes from what looks like books on the subject. Not that much better than the opinions being posted on this thread. Is there an actual peer reviewed academic study showing a causal relationship between pornography consumption and violence against women? If there is, I have to know because I know lots of people who need to see evidence like that, especially in the medical community. If there isn't, this is merely ideological indoctrination as evidenced by their own citations:

> There seems to be a growing willingness of judges to write about the history of sexism and discrimination against women

> Once judges are sensitized to issues of subordination, power and privilege, they can include those ideas in their written opinions and legal reasoning.

So judges are being "sensitized" to these issues? It seems to me that nobody would need to be "sensitized" to the issue if actual evidence existed.

> I have no particular horse in this race, but it's worth noting that quite a few legal scholars have designed proposals or at least theorized under what conditions pornography could be illegalized with a First Amendment friendly law

The author of the piece you cite seems to imagine a giant, previously unrecognized, exception to the First Amendment allowing more extensive regulation of private communication, grounded ultimately in... a case adjudicating the limits of the federal government’s ability to dictate state-government employee benefit decisions under the enforcement clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?

Thanks to the colorful cast of characters involved in Trump’s election-related litigation it is not the single most bizarre legal theory I’ve ever seen from a licensed attorney, but...

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