Words from a 1995 Speech by Erica Jong

As I work to find the right speech for our Living Museum Day, I'm reading several passionate speeches about liberty and suffrage. This excerpt from an address by Erica Jong to the ACLU Biennial Conference in New York City struck me.

Interesting enough, calls for censorship always increase when the population is extremely diverse and different standards prevail. This is almost a given: When you have an elitist or traditional society in which everybody agrees about who gets access to stuff, you don't have calls for censorship...

And basically censorship, once it gets on the books, is always used in a way, to politically harass the dissenter. The reason I remain a First Amendment fundamentalist, is because I understand as a feminist, as a Jew, as a woman who has been battered for expressing herself freely in all her books, I understand the First Amendment protects the minority, protects the dissenter, protects the woman, protects the witch.

Basically, I understand that unless you have a government of laws, rather than a government of people, you can protect dissent. And I understand, as a woman who probably would have been burned in the marketplace for witchcraft only about 200 years ago, that I need the First Amendment more than anybody does. And that even if I am repelled by child pornography or Bob Guccione's productions, that I have to protect those things, because essentially it's in my self-interest to do so.