Pornography, Morality, and Harm: Why Miller Should Survive Lawrence
Pornography, Morality, and Harm: Why Miller Should Survive Lawrence
Elizabeth Harmer Dionne, 15 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 611 (2008)
Justice Scalia certainly supports the government’s right to regulate obscenity. Nonetheless, his dissent in Lawrence is not particularly helpful to the cause of so-called decency. Justice Scalia’s dissent suggests that the primary justification for obscenity regulation is a socially conservative set of sexual mores, akin to the sexual mores that inspired the holding in Bowers v. Hardwick. There are certainly rational, and even compelling, arguments to support conservative notions of both private and public morality and enforcement of the civic norms that will promote such a society. There are also those whose primary objection to pornography stems from conservative sexual mores. Nonetheless, to define Miller as a morality holding effectively ignores the social science research that for three and a half decades has provided troubling evidence of pornography’s negative social consequences, particularly for women. It also ignores the important efforts of the radical feminists who have memorialized pornography’s deleterious effects on large and varied classes of women. Both social science and radical feminism provide important, practical reasons for upholding Miller and the state laws that rely upon it.