Comments Elsewhere

Thanks for this post. I’d be interested to see what your research comes up with.

A couple of notes.

1. The decision that you pointed to isn’t actually about the cartoons that Hustler published, it’s about a short passage printed in Hustler after she filed suit over the cartoons, which read:

His client is “little guy” militant lesbian feminist Andrea Dworkin, a shit-squeezing sphincter in her own right. In her latest publicity-grab Dworkin has decided to sue Hustler for invasion of privacy among other things.

Dworkin seems to be an odd bedfellow for “just folks,” “family values” Spence. After all, Dworkin is one of the most foul-mouthed, abrasive manhaters on Earth. In fact, when Indianapolis contemplated an antizorn ordinance co-authored by Dworkin, she was asked by its supporters to stay away for fear her repulsive presence would kill the statute * * *. Considering that Dworkin advocates bestiality, incest and sex with children, it appears Gerry “this Tongue for Hire” Spence is more interested in promoting his bank account than the traditional values he’d like us to believe he cherishes.

This case is a nuisance suit initiated by Dworkin, a crybaby who can dish out criticism but clearly can’t take it. The real issue is freedom of speech, something we believe even Dworkin is entitled to, but which she would deny to anyone who doesn’t share her views. Any attack on First Amendment freedoms is harmful to all [,] Spence’s foaming-at-the-mouth client especially. You’d think someone of Spence’s stature would know better than to team with a censor like Dworkin.

Again, we’d need to see the briefs. But given the comments in the decision and the facts about Andrea, it’s likely that what she was complaining about as libelous was probably (1) the claim that her suit was a “publicity-grab” and a “nuisance suit” (the latter admits of a technical definition that the Court seemed to contort itself a bit to avoid dealing with); (2) the claim that “when Indianapolis contemplated an antizorn ordinance co-authored by Dworkin, she was asked by its supporters to stay away for fear her repulsive presence would kill the statute”, and (3) the claim that “Dworkin advocates bestiality, incest and sex with children”. The rest seems to be just garden-variety abuse and sleaze, with the exception of the description of Dworkin as a “militant lesbian feminist”, but none of those are terms that she ever hesitated to apply to herself (except when, as in Biological Superiority, she felt she was being bullied).

1. In 1977, Dworkin wasn’t a lesbian separatist, but lesbian separatism wasn’t what she was attacking in Biological Superiority. She footnotes the passage that you cite:

SuperWomon’s ideology is distinguished from lesbian separatism in general (that is, lesbians organizing politically and/or culturally in exclusively female groups) by two articles of dogma: (1) a refusal to have anything to do with women who have anything to do with males, often including women with male children and (2) the absolute belief in the biological superiority of women.

(1) and (2) are what Dworkin is characterizing as “ideological rot”, not “lesbian separatism in general”. You can be a lesbian separatist without committing to (1) or believing in (2), and in fact many (probably most, but I haven’t taken any surveys) lesbian separatists weren’t committed to either.

Come on, Hugo. I’m no Catholic, and I probably have a lot more problems with Benedict than you do, but this is a bit much:

As a Christian of Jewish descent (on my father’s side), and as a professional historian, I share the same uncertainties as Jonathan Dresner. (One canard that I’m quite tired of is the notion that “everyone” joined the Hitler Youth and “went along” because they had no choice. That insults the memories of far too many righteous Germans who were part of the Resistance, from Bonhoeffer to Hans and Sophie Scholl.)

Hans Scholl was 21 when the war broke out and Sophie was 18. Ratzinger was 12 years old. I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty hard for me to blame 12-14 year olds for not facing imprisonment and death in the struggle against even the most Satanic totalitarianism. It’s pretty hard for me to blame 18-21 year olds, for that matter, but at least in that case we are talking about people who are unambiguously adults. (By the time Ratzinger was 18, the war was nearly over. He was drafted into the military; when he was, he did desert his post at the risk of summary execution.)

And, well, I don’t know how to say this exactly, so let’s just go with the quotes:

From Sophie Scholl’s biography on WikiPedia:

In 1932, Sophie started attending a secondary school for girls. At the age of twelve, she joined the Hitler Youth, like most of her classmates. Her initial enthusiasm gradually gave way to criticism. She was aware of the dissenting political views of her father, of friends, and also of some teachers. The political attitude now became an essential criterion in her choice of friends. The arrest of her brothers and friends in 1937 left a strong impression on her.

From Hans Scholl’s bio at the White Rose memorial site:

Hans enrolled in a secondary school. In late 1933, Hans joined the Hitler Youth. He was attracted by their apparently high ideals. However, disappointed by the reality of National Socialism, he sought contact with the ‘Jugendbewegung’ (Youth Movement).

From Pope Benedict XVI’s biography at WikiPedia:

When Ratzinger turned 14 in 1941, he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth, membership of which was legally required from 1938 until the end of the “Third Reich” in 1945. According to National Catholic Reporter correspondent and biographer John Allen, Ratzinger was an unenthusiastic member who refused to attend meetings. Ratzinger has mentioned that a National Socialist mathematics professor arranged reduced tuition payments for him at seminary. While this normally required documentation of attendance at Hitler Youth activities, according to Ratzinger, his professor arranged that the young seminary student did not need to attend those gatherings to receive a scholarship.

It’s worth pointing out that the Scholls each joined the Hitler Youth before it was made legally mandatory. The point here isn’t to run down the Scholls; it’s to point out that people can join terrible organizations when they are young, not knowing very much about what is going on around them, and later repent, and even bring themselves to acts of astonishing courage and love. The fact that Ratzinger was in no position to do this at the age of 14 raises no more moral questions for me than the fact in 1932 Alexander Solzhenitsyn (age 14) was not personally risking his life in the underground to stop the Great Purge and the Terror-Famine in the Ukraine.

Van Helsing: Gentlemen, we are dealing with the undead…

Scholar: Nosferatu…

Van Helsing: Yes, Nosferatu.

Well, there are lots of reasons to be creeped out by Ratzinger, but the whole “former Nazi” thing is unfair.

Ratzinger was 12 years old when World War II broke out. When he was 14 he joined the Hitler Youth because all teenage boys were forced to join the Hitler Youth by law. When he got older he was drafted into the military and he deserted his post at risk of summary execution. Ratzinger’s a lot of things, many of them bad, but a “former Nazi” isn’t one of them.

Of course you don’t want to criticize John Milton for not using inclusive language or Victorian authors for perpetuating the anatomical mystery of the vagina. These are more modern concepts of equality.

Well, why wouldn’t you want to criticize them for this? If positing men as the default is bad for women now it was bad for women then, too, wasn’t it?

Amp:

But we won’t do it, because it would require spending precious tax dollars, and too many Americans would rather see some poor pothead or shoplifter raped than pay higher taxes.

Well. There’s a lot of reasons to condemn popular attitudes towards prison rape (a lot of people continue to think that it’s absolutely hilarious when made into a broad joke). But I don’t think that the issue has anything in particular to do with tax rates. Legislators routinely raise taxes or issue bonds, with no particular political consequence, for building more and larger prisons and have been doing so for years. (Sometimes they even manage to Mau Mau 51+% of ordinary people into signing on to it in a local referendum on, e.g., building a new county jail.)

Voters ought to take rape in prisons seriously enough to ensure that something is done about it, and it’s a sad commentary that they don’t. But the primary source of the problem isn’t voters at all; it’s corrections officers and the prison bureaucracy, who have repeatedly shown their willingness to encourage a climate of sexual violence and terror as a means of internal control—either directly or by turning a strategic blind eye—and to protect each other behind a Blue Wall when guards are negligent or are committing the assaults themselves. Power corrupts, and unaccountable power corrupts without limit.

There’s plenty of money to solve these problems already. The problem is that the legislators don’t care and the corrections officers’ unions block serious reform efforts at every step.

“This view is shared by noted religious theologian Mel Gibson.”

That’s Gibson’s view but it’s not the modern Church’s view. Church teaching since Vatican II flatly contradicts it. Gibson is speaking here as a member of an apostate sect that rejects Vatican II entirely.

“Even in the most strict interpretation, the statement by Jesus does not preclude Protestants from reaching salvation.”

Neither does Cardinal Ratzinger’s statement. Church teaching since Vatican II (Unitatis Redintegratio) has been that trinitarian churches other than the Roman Catholic Church are doctrinally and liturgically “deficient” (which is why the Pope’s Catholic rather than Baptist) but that they participate in the small-c catholic church of Christ and that members of them can be saved.

The brethren divided from us also use many liturgical actions of the Christian religion. These most certainly can truly engender a life of grace in ways that vary according to the condition of each Church or Community. These liturgical actions must be regarded as capable of giving access to the community of salvation.

It follows that the separated Churches and Communities as such, though we believe them to be deficient in some respects, have been by no means deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation. For the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as means of salvation which derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Church.

Ratzinger’s line in Dominus Iesus doesn’t contradict this; it repeats it. The emphasis is shifted to the deficiency rather than the grace, to be sure, but emphasis can shift depending on your purpose, and it’s important to note that in Christian theology saying a person can receive divine grace commits you to saying that they can receive salvation.

Not that I don’t think he’s wrong. I do. But I think he’s wrong because I think God doesn’t exist, not because I think there’s some antagonism here between Ratzinger and Jesus as we find him in the Gospels.

I think you are reading too much into it.

The ruling doesn’t indicate that Dworkin’s brief singled out the description of her as a lesbian as libelous (indeed the ruling says she doesn’t challenge that description in her brief). I’d have to see the appellate briefs (which may be out there, but which I can’t find on the Internet) to know for sure, but it looks pretty likely that Dworkin identified the whole passage as libelous, and that the four claims considered by the court were what the judge parsed out as the statements of fact contained in the passage, not anything that Dworkin singled out. It’s a short passage, and the claim that she’s a lesbian is contained in a single adjective rather than so much as a whole sentence, so it would have been hard to complain about a libel in it without including the sentence in which she is described as a lesbian—even if the description of her as a lesbian is not what she was calling libelous.

Andrea was, incidentally, openly a lesbian, as she attests not only in her address but also e.g. in her memoir, Heartbreak and in numerous interviews. (John Stoltenberg’s essay about living with Andrea recounts how the editor of the New York Times Style page refused to allow the writer to identify them as gay and lesbian, as they had asked to be identified, in 1985.) You might think that the fact that they thought of each other as “life partners” and “in love” with each other tends to disqualify her as a lesbian and him as gay. Without prying unnecessarily into their sex lives, this at least seems like good reason to think that they were intensely romantically connected. But that’s only true if you think that “lesbian” means “a woman only romantically involved with other women” and gay means “a man only romantically involved with other men.” Some people use the words that way and other people don’t; it’s important, if nothing else, to know that a lot of women in the lesbian and radical feminist communities in the 1970s didn’t use the word that way. So it’s not weird or unusual that Andrea Dworkin would describe herself that way.

An argument stands or falls on its own merits, not on the appearance of (or any other facts about) the person who is giving it.

You might say that biographical facts about Dworkin (or Flynt or Goldstein) can be useful to understanding why they argue the way the do, or why they focus on what they focus on, or what have you. That’s fine, but that’s not the same thing as evaluating the arguments that they give (which is a matter for logic, not psychoanalysis).

If you try to argue (as obliterati does above) that Dworkin is unattractive and therefore does not need to be taken seriously when she gives moral and political arguments against pornography. This is just an argumentum ad hominem (abusive form). A rather sleazy one, in this case, since it involves nasty personal abuse and participates in well-worn misogynist gambits. Part of the point here is that nobody would think it’s appropriate to treat male scholars this way: if you went around saying things like “Harold Bloom is a fat old pervert. Who cares what he argues about love and sex in early modern literature?” or “Norman Mailer is a ghastly little garden gnome; what does he know about pornography or sex in contemporary literature?” you would (rightly) be regarded as a twit.