Tread Carefully

At the risk of getting Majikthise or Ampersand mad at me, I have to say I agree with Andrew Sullivan's take on Andrea Dworkin (and David Frum). There's no point in pretending that I've read much (any) Dworkin, but I don't see how it would be possible for the devotion of so much of one's professional and political energy to attacking pornography to be anything other than the expression of a fundamental disdain for personal liberty.

There is a Nagelian bridge law to be found, somewhere, connecting the puritanical right and left, and when (if) it is found, it will be possible to effect a reduction. Here's hoping.

UPDATE: Okay, quickly, to Rad Geek: My point has nothing to do with passing any sort of judgement on Dworkin's scholarship, which I'm not in a position to do. I have no doubt that, as many of her defenders claim, lots of what she said was taken out of context. However, it doesn't take exhaustive reading of her books to know, as Pinko Feminist Hellcat (a name that does indicate feminist sympathies, no?) summarized it:

Dworkin became even more reviled when she teamed up with feminist lawyer Katherine MacKinnon to draft a proposal for a law that defined pornography as a civil rights violation against women, and allowed women to sue the producers and distributors of pornography in a civil court for damages.

This is just a publicly available fact. And I think it justifies the conclusion I drew.