Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v. Minister of Justice: Sex Equality and the Attack on R. v. Butler
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholars and philosophers spend much of their time discussing what pornography means and whether it can be defined. This debate persists despite the fact that most men, regardless of their sexual orientation, seem to understand quite well what pornography is, and what it is for: they produce it commercially, buy it in magazines, rent it in videos, and search for it on the Internet. The pornography industry has the distinct advantage of selling a product that, in legal terms, is considered "expression," and therefore a product that has been declared worthy of constitutional protection under section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v. Minister of Justice challenges the interest of those who want the traffic in pornography to be completely unregulated. Fortunately, the Court in Little Sisters recognized pornography for what it is – the practice of sex inequality – and held that gays and lesbians were no less entitled to legal protections that attempt to limit the inequality that pornography inflicts. The author believes the explanation for this result can be found in the reasons why the Court unanimously recognized that same-sex pornography threatens, rather than promotes, equality rights. The underlying goal of the Little Sisters litigation was to attack the Butler decision by claiming that feminist arguments about pornography were wrong, and inevitably provoke restrictions on the "expression" of "minority sexual practices." This comment begins by setting out some of the facts in Little Sisters, and ends by arguing that gay and lesbian pornography is a threat to sex equality. It does this by examining some of the exhibits at issue in the appeal, on the basis that an appreciation of the range of materials that were potentially affected by the bookstore's claim is important in order to evaluate the claim fairly. It then outlines and critically evaluates the arguments that were advanced by the bookstore, and the intervener groups in support of it. Finally, it situates the Court's decision in this context. Mainly, it supports the Court's decision in Little Sisters, which confirmed most of the findings of the trial judge, but did not strike down the legislation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.025 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".