The past few decades have been a wild ride for adult entertainment. Since the nineties, the internet has made sexy media more accessible to consumers, performers and producers all over the world. Technological advances have democratized the production process so that nearly anyone can make porn—and everyone with a Wi-Fi password can watch it. And, during that time, the adult industry in America has enjoyed a pretty casual relationship with the federal government. Aside from a few notable exceptions during the George W. Bush years, obscenity trials have been few and far between—and good ol’ Dubya was really just trying to follow in his father’s footsteps.
Under George H. W. Bush, then–U.S. Attorney General William Barr, a staunch Catholic, went after the porn industry with a righteous zeal that electrified social conservatives at the time. After aggressively pursuing obscenity prosecutions against pornographers in the early nineties at the behest of Bush Senior, Barr ended his tenure as attorney general with a 1995 essay calling for the government to follow Catholic mores and to “restrain sexual immorality.” He bemoaned that “Today, we are seeing the constant chipping away at laws designed to restrain sexual immorality [and] obscenity.”
Yikes.
Now, today’s morally panicked conservatives are foaming at the mouth in the hopes that Barr will go after pornographers again, after Donald Trump announced that he’d nominated Barr to reprise his role as the country’s top lawyer.
Will he go after porn again?
Since 1995, access to sexual media in the form of pornography has exploded online. If the man who the Daily Beast called an “arch-conservative” hasn’t had a change of heart over the past twenty-three years, pornographers in America might need to buckle up for a bumpy ride.
There have been few federal obscenity prosecutions in recent years, partly because more recent administrations haven’t been particularly interested in them. But also because the porn industry has changed so much and so quickly that federal obscenity laws haven’t been able to keep up effectively.
Still, conservatives like Patrick Trueman, the head of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, are hopeful that Barr could “survey the [porn] industry, find the largest companies, and put them on a target list,” Trueman said.
It will be interesting to see if Barr still feels compelled to go after adult entertainment during his upcoming confirmation hearings. After all, porn may not be the biggest problem facing the Trump administration right now, but, as FSC’s Mike Stabile pointed out to The Washington Examiner, “After all, what better way to distract evangelicals and anti-porners from your relationship to porn and porn stars than to attack it?”
