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Staff members in Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell's office got a chuckle early in February when the conservative Republican couldn't show up for a Larry King show on sweeping anti-pornography legislation he has sponsored. Radical feminist Page Mellish took his place.
McConnell's Pornography Victims' Compensation Act, now before the Senate Judiciary Committee, would allow victims or alleged victims of sex crimes to sue producers and distributors of obscenity if they could prove the crime was somehow incited by the material. Dubbed the Bundy Bill (after serial killer Ted Bundy, who claimed, the night before his execution, that his addiction to hard-core pornography made him torture, maim, and murder), the proposal has the support of fundamentalist Christian organizations, "pro-family" lobbyists, as well as many feminists. As McConnell aide Scott Sowry puts it, "We're getting help from a lot of strange bedfellows on this one."
The McConnell bill received little attention until recently, in part because earlier versions would have allowed civil action against producers and vendors of any sexually explicit material and were clearly unconstitutional. Shortly before Judiciary Committee hearings on the bill last July, though, McConnell rewrote the act to apply only to obscenity and child pornography, neither of which has First Amendment protection. McConnell says he's confident his far-reaching measure has been crafted narrowly and cautiously enough to pass.
But the Pornography Victims' Compensation Act is neither narrowly nor cautiously crafted. The bill defines child pornography as "a description of a minor engaging in or participating in sexually explicit conduct," a definition that covers Lolita, the movie Pretty Baby, and the lyrics of countless pop songs (not to mention a few traditional ones). Just as worrying, as Bob Peck of the American Civil Liberties Union puts it, is the fact that the bill would cause "a serious revision of First Amendment law and tort law, making someone else responsible for someone's intentional criminal act." Similar efforts to exercise social control by assigning liability to third parties (tobacco, alcohol, and...