The Artful Jurist

It took only about a day after news came out about the planned screening of a triple-X rated film at the University of Maryland for the Maryland legislature to whip things up and prompt the university president to pull the plug on the movie.

The on-campus movie theater had scheduled to show Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge this coming weekend. When the news media brought that to light, the Maryland Senate threatened to cut funding to the university. Apparently, it was a rather spirited debate…that is, whenever there wasn’t a group of schoolchildren sitting in the Senate gallery to cause Maryland senators to blush. The Baltimore Sun reports they changed the subject every time kids came into the chamber. (The story doesn’t say whether the senators also started spelling things too naughty to say out loud in front of the tykes.)

Okay, first, no matter how one feels about having pornos on a college campus, is there anyone out there who really believes Annapolis would stop funding the University of Maryland over this? When football season or basketball season rolls around, I can’t imagine the legislature would stop funding the U of M even if they were making pornos on campus.

But, be that as it may, the obvious legal issue to be debated here—at least, the one that seems inescapable to my mind—is a First Amendment freedom of speech issue. While obscenity isn’t a protected form of speech, the definition of what’s obscene is anything but an absolute. (Remember the “I know it when I see it” definition of the U.S. Supreme Court?) So can we expect further debate about this? Well, maybe after the kids leave the room.