Going back to when I first started working in and writing about the adult industry over 25 years ago, I’ve always been somewhat surprised by the number of people I’ve encountered within the industry who self-identify as conservative Republicans.
It’s not that I think there’s anything contradictory (or wrong) about working in porn or enjoying porn and being a Republican; it’s the modifier “conservative” in front of Republican that gives me pause.
While not every conservative is a “social conservative,” it has always struck me as odd that someone who earns her, his or their living in the adult industry would, in effect, caucus with people who believe our industry should be banned, or at the very least prosecuted aggressively under existing obscenity laws and effectively driven underground where they believe we belong.
It’s not an exaggeration to say Republican lawmakers around the country, both in state legislatures and Congress, are engaged in a widespread campaign to chill sexual expression, at best. All one need do is look at the Free Speech Coalition’s Action Center and the multitude of state bills being tracked by the FSC at any given time. While some of the legislation being tracked enjoys bipartisan support, scratch a bit deeper and you’ll note that the more extreme legislation is, invariably, authored and sponsored by legislators with R’s next to their names. It’s also safe to say that there are few Democrats (or voters with no party affiliation) on the boards and staffs of anti-porn groups like the National Center on Sexual Exploitation or Exodus Cry.
It’s not the rhetoric of NCOSE or Exodus Cry to which I call attention today, though. Nor is it some new anti-porn bill or law that seeks to toss out existing First Amendment precedent with respect to pornography and all the protections that go with it, though there are plenty of those from which to choose.
Instead, I’d like self-identifying conservative Republicans to read and consider just a single paragraph of text, which comes from the foreword to a policy agenda published by Project 2025, an agenda “prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country,” as Project 2025 puts it.
Written by Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts, the foreword invites readers to “Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today,” where according to Roberts, “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.”
It is Robert’s prescription to cure the country’s purported pornographic ills, which comes on the fifth page of the foreword, which is of most direct relevance to those of us who work in the adult industry.
“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare,” Roberts writes. “It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
There’s a lot to unpack there, from an interpretation of “obscenity” so broad it bears no resemblance to how American courts have interpreted the law over the last 50 years to the idea that even “telecommunications and technology firms” that merely “facilitate its spread” should be shut down – presumably by the government, although given his hyperbolic rhetoric, I suppose Roberts might not object to the prospect of a mob of citizens shuttering such businesses by force. (Maybe members of the Proud Boys not currently incarcerated for actions taken on January 6, 2021, could lend a hand?)
But the money lines, from the perspective of those who ply their trade in the adult industry obviously are “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”
I’m sure the reaction to this rhetoric from many of the adult industry’s conservative Republicans will be a shrug. Who cares what some egghead president of a conservative think tank believes, right? His ideas are so far from the mainstream of legal thought, Robert’s wish to see us imprisoned will never come to fruition.
The thing is, until recently, many of the pro-choice Republicans I know (yes, there’s still a chunk of pro-choice Republicans out there) thought the same thing about abortion and the protective precedent of Roe v. Wade – and we all saw how that turned out.
On the one hand, there’s a great deal of distance between where we stand now and a total prohibition of pornography, mass incarceration of pornographers and shutdown of major telecommunications and technology firms.
On the other hand, looking at the current composition of the Supreme Court, in truth maybe that distance is only the width of a couple future Justice’s shoulders.
