"The justices have constitutionally protected obscenity in libraries, filth over cable television, and now unlimited internet pornography"
About this Quote
Schlafly’s line is engineered to sound like a verdict: not merely that culture is coarsening, but that the Supreme Court has actively ordained the coarsening. The phrase “constitutionally protected” is the rhetorical dagger. It recasts free speech not as a liberty worth tolerating at the margins, but as a loophole cynically exploited to smuggle “obscenity” into everyday life. She’s not arguing about pornography so much as prosecuting elite institutions for abandoning the public.
The sentence works by stacking locations of presumed innocence and normalcy (libraries), domestic routine (cable television), and then the new, ungovernable frontier (the internet). That escalation is intentional: it turns a set of separate controversies into a single slippery slope narrative. By the time you reach “unlimited internet pornography,” the conclusion feels less like a claim than like a panic button. “Unlimited” does a lot of work: it suggests not only scale, but helplessness, the state’s loss of parental and community control.
Context matters. Schlafly built her political identity on mobilizing social conservatives against what she framed as liberal overreach from courts, universities, and media. This quote sits in the post-Roe, post-sexual revolution backlash, updated for the late-20th-century fight over cable TV standards and early internet regulation. The subtext is federalism and power: local norms are being overwritten by distant judges. She’s recruiting readers to see censorship not as repression, but as self-defense against a judiciary that, in her telling, has mistaken permissiveness for principle.
The sentence works by stacking locations of presumed innocence and normalcy (libraries), domestic routine (cable television), and then the new, ungovernable frontier (the internet). That escalation is intentional: it turns a set of separate controversies into a single slippery slope narrative. By the time you reach “unlimited internet pornography,” the conclusion feels less like a claim than like a panic button. “Unlimited” does a lot of work: it suggests not only scale, but helplessness, the state’s loss of parental and community control.
Context matters. Schlafly built her political identity on mobilizing social conservatives against what she framed as liberal overreach from courts, universities, and media. This quote sits in the post-Roe, post-sexual revolution backlash, updated for the late-20th-century fight over cable TV standards and early internet regulation. The subtext is federalism and power: local norms are being overwritten by distant judges. She’s recruiting readers to see censorship not as repression, but as self-defense against a judiciary that, in her telling, has mistaken permissiveness for principle.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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