Overview

Throughout history obscenity has not really been about sex but about degradation. Sexual depictions have been suppressed when they were seen as lowering the status of humans, furthering our distance from the gods or God and moving us toward the animals. In the current era, when we recognize ourselves and both humans and animals, sexual depiction has lost some of its sting. Its degrading role has been replaced by hate speech that distances groups, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, not only from God but from humanity to a subhuman level. In this original study of the relationship between obscenity and hate speech, First Amendment specialist Kevin W. Saunders traces the legal trajectory of degradation as it moved from sexual depiction to hateful speech. Looking closely at hate speech in several arenas, including racist, homophobic, and sexist speech in the workplace, classroom, and other real-life scenarios, Saunders posits that if hate speech is today’s conceptual equivalent of obscenity, then the body of law that dictated obscenity might shed some much-needed light on what may or may not qualify as punishable hate speech.

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9780814741443

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Reviews

While the book covers much ground that is familiar to even casual scholars of the subject, it does so in an innovative fashion, interweaving diverse topics such as global religion, the theory of evolution, and contemporary critical race and legal theory. -S. B. Lichtman, Choice

Professor Kevin Sounders' book addresses two topics in the First Amendment law not commonly associated with one another, obscenity law and hate speech . . . the book makes a substantial contribution to this decidedly thorny area of First Amendment law. -Kevin Saunders, Law and Politics Book Review

Degradation: What the History of Obscenity Tells Us About Hate Speech presents a compelling and timely argument.

Author Information

Kevin W. Saunders is Charles Clarke Chair in Constitutional Law at Michigan State University College of Law. He is the author of Violence as Obscenity: Limiting the Media's First Amendment Protection and Saving Our Children from the First Amendment (NYU Press, 2003).

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