Goldberg and Guthrie

For some reason, I was inspired to fire off a defense of Catherine MacKinnon today to Jonah Goldberg. He posted it, complete with my errors. Of course, I call him "evil" in the nicest sense of the word.

Link.

The e-mail:

Mr. Goldberg-
I don't think Catherine MacKinnon needs me to defend her, but I think your remark that her most famous campaign was a failure is inaccurate. You focus your post on date rape and pornography and compare the success of those two efforts. But you ignore MacKinnon's most successful (and arguably most famous) campaign, which was against sexual harassment. Before MacKinnon, sexual harassment was not a term that most people had any familiarity with, let alone the basis for a civil or criminal prosecution. In large part thanks to her efforts, the term is now a part of every American's life and, for better or for worse, has drastically changed the way men and women interact in and out of the work place. (In fact, she has probably had more of an effect on American's lives than any almost any other lawyer in history.)

On one hand, you are right because she herself may be more widely noticed for her work on pornography. On the other hand, I think her efforts against sexual harassment are more famous (although fewer people may associate those efforts with her - if that makes sense) and are more important and worthwhile. She would probably disagree with me on that last part and say that pornography and sexual harassment are equal wrongs, although I won't put words into her mouth.

Full disclosure, MacKinnon was a law school professor of mine. Although I did not interact with her very much, I found her to be a very nice person. I also agree with her on many things, although I am too much of a radical on free speech issues to support her positions on pornography.

(Additionally, she allowed you to choose your own exam question from a list of about 20 that was given to you in advance, and one of those questions in essence allowed you to write your own question. Awesome.)

Thanks, I enjoy your posts.

Here is the Goldberg post I was responding to.

Good thing it is largely anonymous (except, now, to readers of this blog), because some of those sentences really seem like they were written by a five year old. Of course, so do most of my posts on this blog and most of the written product I am paid to produce.