August 10
REGARDING THE ongoing controversy over the fact that women's public exposure
of their breasts for certain reasons is no longer a legally indecent act in Ontario:
In 1964, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart held in his concurring opinion
for the criminal obscenity case Jacobellis vs. Ohio that the only pornography that
legislatures in America have the constitutional power to enact criminal obscenity
laws against what legally constitutes hard-core pornography. As to what the definition
of "hard-core pornography" is, Justice Stewart provided the following
much-ridiculed answer: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds
of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps
I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it and
the motion picture involved in this case is not that." Today, the Supreme Court
of Canada holds that the public acts that our federal legislature has enacted criminal
indecency laws against are ones that, from a legal perspective, the Canadian community
finds to be "intolerable," it conspicuously has neglected to mention what
characteristic that is common to all of them makes them units of this legal concept;
in other words, it has never stated what the definition of this legal concept is.
Apparently, the court could never succeed in intelligibly defining the legal concept
of "intolerable," but it knows what the Canadian community finds to be
"intolerable" when it sees it. It should be noted that in a free and democratic
society, ignorance of the requirements and prohibitions of unknowable laws is a
valid excuse for having violated these laws.
Lily Medeiros
President
Naturist Women of Ontario
(You'll excuse us for not trying that one out next time we're in front of
a judge)