Why Racism Is Now The Pornography Of Modern Discourse

In 1964 Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously had this to say about pornography: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

In this case, the court found in favor of a movie theater that was allegedly showing an obscene film. The “I know it when I see it” definition is obviously problematic in myriad ways, not least of which is that a person crossing the line into porn, or any other restricted activity, has no real basis to know where that line is.