The Artful Jurist

Well, it looks like free speech at the University of Maryland has won out over the smut snatchers in the Annapolis state house…sort of. Student protests caused the university to back off a bit from its forced cancellation of a triple-X rated film that had been scheduled to be shown at the movie theater on campus this week.

Originally, the university’s administration pulled the plug on the skin flick’s showing when the Maryland Senate got wind of it and threatened to yank state funding from the U of M. Well, as I predicted in my last post (and I certainly don’t claim it took any brilliance on my part to make the prediction), that raised the hackles of First Amendment advocates who called the cancellation censorship and a violation of free speech.

A compromise was struck, and last night the University of Maryland allowed excerpts of the film to be screened in a classroom, but only so long as it also included what the university called an “educational component.” In this case, that educational component was a pre-screening panel discussion. (Yeah, that’s what your basic porno audience is looking for—a panel discussion.) The Baltimore Sun printed a U of M statement that said it did this to “explore other ways to return to the topics of responsible decision-making and effects of pornography in our society.” Gee, doesn’t that sound lofty?

Hey, if this works out, maybe the university should consider screening pornos as part of all of its classes. If my undergraduate university had done that, I know I would’ve looked forward to my philosophy class a lot more.