As the first female president of the American Civil Liberties Union, Nadine Strossen strives to ensure the rights of individuals, which she believes are increasingly jeopardized by today's "politics of symbolism and scapegoating."
Strossen advocates the sanctity of individual rights above all else and carries a passion that sustains her through the tiring quest of attempting to empower the powerless-who, in her estimation, include immigrants, the homeless, the poor, children, people accused of crime, and people convicted of crime.
"The list is so depressingly long," Strossen said. "There is not one branch of government where civil liberties are not under attack."
Tonight at 8 p.m., Strossen will bring her sincere brand of activism to Page Auditorium, where she will deliver a speech addressing current threats to individual civil liberties.
Strossen believes the risks facing these liberties have become more formidable as the gap between Republicans and Democrats has closed. Such a trend, she believes, has left the ACLU with few voices on Capitol Hill.
"On so many major issues there are no allies in politics," she said. The result, she explains, is that civil liberties are attacked by attractively-packaged bills. "They have very Orwellian titles that don't have much to do with the substance," Strossen said, pointing to the recent anti-terrorist legislation as an example.
Another similar measure, Strossen believes, is the recently passed Communications Decency Act, which calls for certain restrictions on Internet and television access. She is especially passionate about the political hypocrisy of this legislation, which she argues is masked in claims of pro-family, pro-children motivations. "It's creating the future for [America's youth]-what rights you will have or not have," she said.
She added that the debate about censorship and information technology transcends the simple right to access pornography on the Internet. The debate, she emphasized, is rather concerned with the uninhibited individual right "to affirmatively seek things out."
Tackling such volatile issues as the first female president of the ACLU is a mixed blessing for Strossen.
Though she holds this gender-stereotype breaking role, her anti-censorship views regarding pornography have solicited criticism from other prominent feminists. The controversy's source is anchored in the conflicting interpretations of pornography as both discrimination and as freedom of expression.
"Historically, it's the other way around," Strossen said. "If you take the women's movement, it has always supported freedom of expression. Only quite recently-say in the late 1970s-did a brand of feminism come to the fore which said that pornography is discrimination and should be censored. You can't assume that feminists of like mind are together on this. There is an odd alliance between the very left and the very right. They both agree [on censorship] for very different reasons."
Rather than denounce the differences among feminists, however, Strossen chooses to applaud their effects.
"As a committed feminist-and it's a term I still choose to use for myself even though it's lost favor with the younger generation-I think that it is healthy to disagree and discuss," she said.
For Strossen, freedom of speech and expression are paramount in fighting discrimination, particularly the type of sexual discrimination that undergirds feminist theory. She has employed this philosophy in her most recent book, "Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex and the Fight for Women's Rights," a provocative work that has been both lauded and harshly criticized by her colleagues.
Strossen sees herself primarily as an activist fighting battles against injustice and threats to civil liberties in all arenas-constantly engaged in both large, visible battles and small skirmishes.
As a professor of law at New York Law School, where she has taught since 1988, Strossen employs a legal foundation in her defense of civil liberties. Indeed Strossen's entire professional and educational life has been grounded in the law.
Strossen graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard-Radcliffe College in 1972 and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1975, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. In 1984, after ten years of practicing law privately, Strossen moved into academia, where she now teaches advanced constitutional law and appellate advocacy at New York Law School. Her work has earned her such accolades as the Jaycees International's "The Outstanding Young Persons" Award and The Media Institute's Freedom of Speech Award, and she has been recognized in the National Law Journal as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America.
Strossen believes her most important battles are waged in the field, where she attempts to educate the public on the need for civil liberties through her visible involvement in the public arena.
Next week, Strossen will be debating the conservative former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork on the issue of censorship. Such active engagements as these, Strossen feels, are of primary importance for the ACLU's purposes.
"I'm so busy fighting these fights," Strossen said. "To me that has to take precedence over writing a book."
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