Page 373 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 21 February 1990
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What these people rely on is scaremongering. They rely on fear and lies to take advantage of genuine Christians who do not know any better, who believe the sort of lies that are presented. That is how the argument has gone on X-rated videos; that is how people have been swayed - not by the truth, but by lies. That is not to say - and I emphasise this again - that I think X-rated movies are wonderful. I do not. But I am not going to tell other people what they can watch and what they cannot watch in relation to something that does no harm and cannot be shown to do harm. In relation to things that can be shown to do harm, I have no hesitation in supporting censorship.
On violence, we hear the arguments again and again. I wish to refer to a very recent - not two weeks old - report from the National Committee on Violence. It is called "Violence Directions of Australia". The committee concedes that a state of physiological arousal may be induced. But it believes that that does not of itself justify the prohibition of any stimulus, with a tendency to evoke arousal, sexual or otherwise. The committee goes on to talk about sexism and the denigration of women. By the way, this is a majority report, with one exception.
The Committee deplores sexism and the denigration of women. It feels, however, that values such as these, no less than other anti-social thoughts, are best combated not by censorship, but by criticism, censure and stigmatization in the marketplace of ideas.
That is the sort of logical, rational approach that we need, not the notion that we just ban something and create a whole underworld black market for it.
As part of the attempt to ban, we have heard Mr Stevenson talking about movies that describe people urinating on each other and giving that as a reason for banning them. I will take this opportunity to read from one of the greatest political satirists who has ever written in the English language. I refer to Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels. Some people may think that Gulliver's Travels is a children's story, and indeed there are versions of it that fit that description. Gulliver first travelled to Brobdingnag and Lilliput, the land of the giants and the land of the little people. But later on he travelled to Laputia and other places, and finally to the land of the Houyhnhms - a difficult one to pronounce. In fact, it is the land of horses and hence you get a slight neigh as you say "Houyhnhms".
Swift describes the scene when Gulliver first meets some of the people there, and the satire is such that the horses that he describes live in what he perceives as the perfect world. However, as he goes on, he realises that their perfect world has a great number of faults. It is the sort of world that would ban and censor. The people in this
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