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

The Struggle for Respect
causal nexus to violence. Activists from the Baptist Temple and
Citizens for Decency through Law packed the audience, booing and
hissing the ineffectual opposition by the Indiana Civil Liberties
Union, the Urban League president, and a feminist former city
attorney.
The ordinance passed 24-5, although most proponents had not
read it and some thought it unconstitutional. Black Democratic
Councillor Rozelle Boyd then moved to limit city spending on legal
defence to $200,000 but was defeated 19-7. As soon as the mayor
signed the law the American Booksellers Association and the ACLU
sought a federal injunction, supported by an amicus brief from the
Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce, signed by Betty Friedan, Kate
Millett, and Adrienne Rich, among other notables. 11 Judge Sarah
Evans Barker, a Reagan appointee sworn in just a month before,
granted the injunction. The Seventh Circuit affirmed in an opinion
by Frank Easterbrook, another Reagan appointee, who criticised the
ordinance as "thought control" for establishing "an 'approved' view
of women, of how they may react to sexual encounters, of how the
sexes may relate to each other." By the time the Supreme Court
denied the appeal the city's legal expenses exceeded $300,000.
Almost a decade after the Minneapolis ordinance was drafted,
variants are still being debated in the Massachusetts legislature and
the U.S. Congress. Women have written dozens of letters to the
Senate Judiciary Committee urging their passage as an apology for
the Clarence Thomas confirmation and the William Kennedy Smith
rape acquittal. 12
//. Racial Hatred
My next story concerns racial hatred. In 1950 Joseph Beauharnais
distributed leaflets for the White Circle League in the form of a
petition to the Chicago city council and mayor
to halt the further encroachment, harassment, and invasion of
white people, their property, neighborhoods and persons, by the
Negro .... If persuasion and the need to prevent the white race
from becoming mongrelized by the negro will not unite us, then
the aggressions . . . rapes, robberies, knives, guns and marijuana
of the negro surely will.
He was convicted under the state group libel law, which the U.S.
8