Christopher Kendall, the Courts, and Gay Male Porn
March 29, 2006 · By Peter Rempel
Brought to you by UBC Press:
Gay Male Pornography
An Issue of Sex Discrimination
Christopher KendallThe 2000 case of Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v. Customs Canada provided Canada’s highest court with its first opportunity to consider whether the analysis set out in R. v. Butler — in which the Supreme Court identified pornography as an issue of sex discrimination — applies to pornography intended for a lesbian or gay male audience. The Court held that it did, finding that, like heterosexual pornography, same-sex pornography also violates the sex equality interests of all Canadians.
Christopher Kendall supports this finding, arguing that gay male pornography reinforces those social attitudes that create systemic inequality on the basis of sex and sexual orientation — misogyny and homophobia alike — by sexually conditioning gay men to those attitudes and practices.
Little Sisters argued that gay porn, in stark contrast to its straight counterpart, was liberating and a positive component of gay life. As such, it could not be counted as discriminating against women, as the court found straight porn did in Butler. In the case, the B.C. court ruled against Little Sisters and found that gay porn does lead to gender discrimination.
Which leads to some rather perplexing questions. How does two men having sex perpetuate discrimination against women? The court should have seen this problem coming in its Butler ruling, but it didn’t. Luckily, the B.C. court that ruled in Little Sisters was willing to protect the Butler ruling by handing down an incoherant decision.
Of course, this is a problem that would never have existed if Canadian courts had not decided that “community standards” were arbitrary and offensive and that pornography was only wrong when it was deemed to have harmed women. But no matter. Incoherant rulings are no problem when members of the Court Party like Kendall are willing to write books praising them. And (suprise of suprises) who is there to cheer on Kendall’s new affront to common sense?:
“Christopher Kendall’s extensively researched, bravely theorized, and brilliantly argued book spares no sentimentalities, suffers no cliches, pulls no punches. Equally strong in law and politics, his analysis is perceptive at every turn of the page. Most of all, this book is fearless�??which is what will be needed to survive telling so much truth in the face of so many lies.�
-–Catharine A. MacKinnon is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.
Lawyers, be it in the courts they preside over or the faculties of law they staff, are today better at jingling rhetoric than actually thinking. Hopelessly, exacerbated by the rationalism of the Charter, they actually think they are actually thinking and speaking the truth; not just playing with logic and other word games, running along popular trains of thought, in the absence of any reverence for justice.
How’s that for the back of a book cover! ;-)
Exactly. As Morton and Knopff write, “Judges themselves are the most prominent leaders of the Charter Revolution. The judges deny this, claiming that they do only what they are mandated to do by the constitutional documents. Nonsense! More often than not, they make up the law as they go along.”