ally an acceptable justification for a restriction on liberty in a liberal framework, it is up to liberals to deliver a coherent rebuttal to MacKinnon et al.'s contention that pornography causes genuine physical and psychological harm to women, rather than just revulsion. To date I have not seen a liberal rebuttal which did not make the assumption that the root of the problem of pornography is simply moral offence, i.e. strongly held preferences against the propagation of pornography. I find the feminist claims about harm to be very persuasive, and until they are addressed by liberals in terms of a rebuttal of the harm, rather than by reference to the moral disvalue of pornography, the onus should rest on them. Second, the ordinance is not an attempt to arrive at a coherent theoretical position on pornography, but is an attempt to solve a social problem through the mechanism of law. If the attempt of the existing legal system to redress such problems is illegitimate simply on abstract liberal grounds, it need not be a fundamental practical concern of feminists to convince liberals that the ordinance is acceptable. From the feminist strategic perspective, it is enough to show, as I am attempting, that some form of the ordinance coheres well with the existing legal tradition whether that tradition is fundamentally liberal or otherwise. The problem of theoretical legitimacy of the legal system as a whole need not be of particular concern for proponents of the ordinance; what is important is redressing the harms done to women by the political and legal means at hand. Moreover, I am not convinced, given the comments of Dickson J. above, that liberal theories are committed to abandoning the notion of harm and the means of redress which we see in the existing legal framework. Perhaps then only certain categories of liberalism would take objection with the notion of harm addressed in Keegstra or the OHRC. The second major probl...
