speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

Taking Sides
personal responsibility for her sexuality" and must be "cautious about
where she goes and with whom." If raped, she "must accept the consequences,
and, through self-criticism, resolve never to make that mistake
again." Rape "does not destroy you forever. . . . It's like getting beaten
up. Men get beat [sic] up all the time." Anita Hill is not a "feminist
heroine," and Clarence Thomas emerged from the hearings "with vastly
increased stature." Paglia was "delighted that [William Kennedy] Smith
was acquitted" of rape. (1992; see also 1990).
21
Stephen L. Carter (Yale Law School); Shelby Steele (San Jose State
University English department); Linda Chavez (Equal Employment
Opportunities Commission); Glenn C. Loury (Boston University economics
department); Thomas Sowell (Hoover Institute, economics);
Walter E. Williams (George Mason University economics department);
Randall Kennedy (Harvard Law School). See, e.g. Carter (1991).
22
Guardian 3 (November 21, 1991).
23
Los Angeles Times A1 (February 28, 1992) (obituary).
24
New York Times sA p.3 (December 29, 1991), A4 (December 31, 1991),
A3 (February 10, 1992). The government banned political activity in the
mosques and closed three independent daily newspapers for "endangering
the nation's interest." New York Times A16 (August 20, 1992).
25
New York Times A3 (February 10, 1992).
26
Guardian 6 (September 18, 1991), 6 (October 21, 1991), 26 (November
22, 1991).
27
New York Times A10 (February 6, 1992), A7 (February 25, 1992).
28
Repohistory, a group of 65 artists, installed 39 signs in lower Manhattan
with the approval of the Department of Transportation. The one on
Maiden Lane showed a doll with an illustration of a hymen taken from a
medical textbook, explaining that the street got its name from the young
girls who did the laundry along a stream in the 17th century. A 40-year
old woman said: "It's disgusting. Everyone's taste in art varies, but I just
think this particular thing is offensive to women." New York Times A14
(August 27, 1992).
29
Hughes (1980).
30
New York Times s.2 p. 10 (March 15, 1992).
31
If a charge of blasphemy against Islam has terrorised Salman Rushdie for
nearly four years, Gore Vidal's publisher has exulted in similar accusations
against his novel Live from Golgotha (1992), reproducing them in
newspaper advertisements:
It's too funny to be condemned simply as a blasphemous novel that
should be added to the Vatican's Index of banned works and censored
by the book police anywhere. Like it or not, its assault on the New
Testament prophets or their modern successors and on religion in
general is in a bawdy and anti-hypocritical tradition that goes back to
Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac and our own Sinclair Lewis. (Herbert Mitgang,
New York Times)
Bracingly blasphemous. Vidal still hasn't gone respectable: Christians
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