Doubling the Standard
Harry S. Ashmore
In First Monday in October, the movie that anticipated appointment of the first woman to the United States Supreme Court, Walter Matthau plays a role that amiably caricatures the late William O. Douglas. The plot is built around a protracted judicial skirmish over censorship in which the fictional Justice Douglas, true to the spirit of the original, refuses to attend the screening of a pornographic film on the ground that it would be a waste of time, since, no matter how salacious it might be, he would not vote to ban it. "It is curious about censorship, how one reacts," Matthau observed. He found himself in wholehearted agreement when the script had the new female justice contending that pornography is inherently demeaning to womankind and, at the extreme, an incitement to violence. "Then I would hear myself putting the opposite view and believe everything I was saying," Matthau continued. "I suppose my emotional reaction is that there should be total censorship but my intelligent reaction is that there should be hardly any."
In the course of more than 25 years as vice-chairman of the advisory council of the American Civil Liberties Union, I have had occasion to consider the issue in its most pointed application, and I find that I still share Matthau's ambivalence. So, to my knowledge, did my friend Bill Douglas, although his absolutist reading of the First Amendment led him, on balance, to come down against any abridgment of free speech. But I doubt that he would have avoided such a screening—certainly not if, in addition to being lascivious, the film also was reputed to be funny. He once explained to me, with considerable glee, why his venerable brethren had so much difficulty agreeing on a definition of pornography
