IN On Liberty, John Stuart Mill saw clearly a problem whose importance contemporary liberals have forgotten. The following quotation from On Liberty will serve as a motto for this book.

Mill saw that the social and cultural environment of a society can prevent its members from leading the best life possible just as surely as can repression by the state. To Mill, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, it seemed that stringent protection for freedom of expression would produce the necessary reforms to the cultural environment. To us, living at the end of the twentieth century, there is now much less reason to be optimistic about the efficacy of Mill's laissez-faire attitude toward the cultural environment. Expression in its various forms produces and sustains our cultural environment, and that environment is still, more than a century after Mill wrote, polluted with racist, sexist, classist, ableist, and heterosexist attitudes.