Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy: A Guide to America's Censorship Wars [Anglais] [Broché]

With great courage and skill, Marjorie Heins has kept the First Amendment and cultural freedom alive in America today. Her book shows why she deserves a major chapter when the next history of the First Amendment gets written.

Censorship has been perpetrated in the name of religion and morality (blasphemy and book banning), in the name of decency (public nudity and obscenity), and in the name of protecting women (pornography). Artistic expression has been one of its primary casualties, and so has attention to the real social issues that lead to breakdowns in our society. Delving into a variety of instances of censorship, Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy discloses the ultimate casualty of censorship: freedom, especially for marginalized groups like women and minorities. It is rich with examples that are both chilling and pointed. This is an excellent resource for enabling all of us to reexamine our own knee-jerk responses to censorship, and to ask ourselves where the real danger lies and what we stand to lose.

In 1989 strange things began to happen in these United States. Musicians and music store owners were charged with crimes for singing songs or selling tapes and records. The U.S. Congress passed a resolution condemning a major museum for permitting a display that "encourages disrespect for the flag." The federal arts funding agency was accused of blasphemy for assisting artists whose work dealt with religious themes. And so "censorship" became a key word in political debate. In Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy, the founding director of the ACLU Arts Censorship Project discusses the most hotly contested censorship issues.

If words and pictures are to be blamed for the behavior of unstable individuals, we might as well start by outlawing the Bible. That good book has probably been cited as inspiration or justification for crime more frequently than any other text in Western history, from the inquisitions, witch-burnings, and pogoms of earlier eras to child abuse and ritual murders today. As one writer puts it, "If the state can ban pornography because it "causes" violence against women, it can also ban The Wretched of the Earth because it causes revolution, Gay Community News because it causes homosexuality, Steal This Book because it causes thievery, and The Feminine Mystique because it causes divorce."