One of the adult industry's foremost legal defenders was honored by the Southwest Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio at a banquet at the Clarion Hotel here on April 15.
H. Louis Sirkin, of the Cincinnati firm of Sirkin, Pinales, Mezibov & Schwartz, was fêted along with his partner, Mark Mezibov, and local teacher Ralph Ross for their commitment to free speech and civil rights, as part of the Southwest Ohio ACLU's annual ceremony, which was attended by about 100 people.
"He has brought CPR to the Constitution, which has its breath, which is a living instrument," lauded Marty Pinales, Sirkin's law partner of 30 years. "He has lived and breathed and exercised the Bill of Rights throughout his entire practice, representing the unpopular, the accused and the oppressed."
Pinales got a chuckle by presenting Sirkin with a bran muffin in which he'd stuck a candle, in honor of Sirkin's then-upcoming 60th birthday, noting Sirkin's recent acquisition of a "Golden Buckeye" senior citizen's discount card. "He can now get into the movies at half-price that he will later defend," Pinales quipped.
"To me, the Bill of Rights is the most important thing we have, and I've given a lot of time to it," Sirkin said upon taking the rostrum. "I've always believed you fight free speech with louder speech.
"I have a dream," Sirkin continued, noting the National Pro-Family Conference on Pornography, Sexually Oriented Businesses and Material Harmful to Minors which had just concluded at a hotel in nearby Ft. Mitchell, Ky. "A dream that someday people can tolerate each other; that we can tolerate differences of opinion; that we can tolerate differences in lifestyles, and we can all sit together in a room and be friends... The message I want to send to the people at the Drawbridge [Inn] is that I'm 60 years young, I've got a lot of fight in me, I've got a great office to do it with... and we're going to win the dream. We're going to keep fighting."
On behalf of the ACLU, attorney William Messer (who had worked with Sirkin on several cases) presented the sexagenarian with a plaque which read, "H. Louis Sirkin, with great determination and commitment, you have agitated and litigated for those freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, especially intellectual freedom. Through the sharing of your knowledge, experience and passion, you educate colleagues and the public alike about traditional freedoms. You've expanded justice for all Americans. With admiration, we look forward to what you will accomplish in the years to come."
The evening's keynote address was then delivered by John Frohnmayer, former director of the National Endowment for the Arts under the Bush administration, who echoed several of Sirkin's viewpoints, and gave an overview of censorship since the Middle Ages.
Frohnmayer noted, for instance, that in the '20s, jazz music was considered as disgraceful as porn is today, with at least one professor reporting that pregnant women who listened to jazz were likely to have deformed children, and the city of Chicago making it illegal to display a saxophone or trumpet after 8 p.m. "What does this all mean for us today, in this age of enlightenment?" Frohnmayer asked. "Obviously, it means that we haven't learned a damned thing."
[For further quotes from Frohnmayer's speech, see Legal News & Commentary in the current issue of AVN. -Ed.]
