About a week after a lawmaker in the neighboring state of Tennessee introduced a bill that would block all porn sites for any viewer who did not “opt in” to view porn, a Mississippi legislator has introduced not one but two bills that would ban all online porn completely.
In fact, according to a report on the local news site Y’all Politics, the bills authored by Republican Rep. Tracy Arnold would not only ban porn in Mississippi but also would create a coalition of Southern states where the porn ban would apply.
Other states would need to join in the legislation, but among those Arnold’s bill targets would be Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and Oklahoma.
The states would join to create what one of the bills, HB 1116, calls an “Area of Moral Decency.”
Arnold told the site that because the state would define “pornography” for purposes of the bill, the new proposed law would not infringe on First Amendment freedoms.
“This isn’t an attempt to infringe on anyone’s rights,” the Republican said. “It’s to protect our children.”
Arnold’s companion bill, HB 1120, would bar social media platforms from carrying advertisements for “obscene and pornographic content.”
As AVN.com has reported, a 2016 study found that in the U.S. the states with the highest numbers of people who describe themselves as religious are also the states with the highest rates of porn consumption. Mississippi led the way among all U.S. states, with porn viewers spending an average of 11 minutes and eight seconds per visit to the porn “tube” site PornHub.
As bans against online porn have taken hold, or at least been seriously considered, in countries around the world, conservative groups in the United States have undertaken a push to persuade Donald Trump—despite his previous relationship with AVN Hall of Famer Stormy Daniels—to lead a new “War on Porn” on the domestic front.
Photo by Michael Barera / Wikimedia Commons
