Feminists and Free Speech

Writing in National Review, the Hudson Institute’s Stanley Kurtz does a good job of puncturing the anti-free speech views held by many radical feminists, which are now on full display in the controversy over the Independent Women’s Forum newspaper ad.

As Kurtz points out, when University of California-Los Angeles Clothesline Project activist Christie Scott says of that ad that, “I think it was a violent ad, a very hostile ad” or that “the ad is so violent in nature and is presented in such a hostile way,” that she’s simply applying the anti-speech rhetoric of radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon to real world issues.

It is no coincidence that, like MacKinnon herself has often done in the past, Scott and others casually dismiss the First Amendment in ways that used to be reserved for those on the far right. Scott, for example, complained that the Daily Bruin, which ran the IWF ad, claimed that it “was basically justified through a free-speech argument. I feel that’s somewhat cowardly.”

For Kurtz, this latest flap — along with that surrounding the anti-slavery reparations ad that David Horowitz attempted to place in campus newspapers — is yet more proof that the campus speech codes and “authoritarian rants” from feminists and others is have a long-term deleterious effect on the way that college students view freedom and democracy.

Source:

Feminists Against Speech. Stanley Kurtz, National Review Online, May 24, 2001.

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