Right To Bare...Arms

Woe are the students at UMCP who were looking forward to some, err, "cinema:"

Tickets were selling fast for Saturday night's showing of a "XXX blockbuster" at the University of Maryland's student union. (Pirates! Skeletons! An orgy of belly dancers!) Then, like a douse of cold water, the state Senate stepped in. During debate yesterday over the state budget -- an exercise usually devoid of sex appeal -- a conservative senator drew his colleagues' attention to the scheduled showing of "Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge," a hard-core porn film, at the state's flagship university. The award-winning sequel is almost 2 1/2 hours' worth of, uh, swashbuckling. The cast is full of actors whose names are registered trademarks. The film is full of special effects (to say the least). Legislators were not impressed. Sen. Andrew P. Harris (R-Baltimore County) called it "shocking" and offered a budget amendment: Any public university that allowed the screening of a triple-X film would forfeit state funding -- about $424 million next year in U-Md.'s case.

An interesting proposal, considering that there were no state funds involved in putting this movie out in the Hoff Theater; it was student activities fees. So basically, some nutball state congressman wants to cuts state funding to UMCP for showing a movie the students themselves paid for. In fact, the student/student groups against the film don't even agree with Sen. Harris' tactics. Liz Ciavolino, from Feminism Without Borders: "I really don't think the state should bully us around with their budget power." Aaron Titus of the Maryland Coalition Against Pornography: "The University of Maryland should be responding to the power of ideas, not the power of the purse." Of course if Harris had bothered to do some checking, he would have learned that:

The screening would not have been the school's porn premiere. In the 1980s or '90s, Cunningham said, there was a soft-core series called "Take It Off at the Hoff." Several years ago, "Deep Throat" was shown to a sellout crowd, with few complaints. More recently, some doctoral candidates held a film series looking at ways that Elizabethan plays have been referenced in hard-core movies. They called it "Shakesporn."

Oh, and the money quote goes to Titus:

"I would challenge the university to conduct a thorough inquiry into the harms of pornography."

Now that's a committee that wouldn't be hard to fill (damn puns).