Anti-porn crusaders are celebrating Donald Trump’s nomination of William Barr, 68, to be the next Attorney General of the United States, fondly recalling Barr’s first term as the country’s top law enforcement officer from 1991 to 1993, when Barr led a campaign of anti-porn prosecutions and was praised by President George H.W. Bush for the “superb job” he did cracking down on “obscenity,” according to a report in the conservative Washington Examiner newspaper.
Senate confirmation hearings for Barr open Tuesday, January 15, at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Donna Rice Hughes, president of the anti-porn group Enough is Enough, “applauded” Barr’s nomination, saying in a press release that Trump had pledged to appoint an attorney general “to aggressively enforce federal obscenity, child pornography, sexual predation, and sex trafficking laws.”
In a 1991 speech, Bush 1 praised Barr’s legal crusade against porn sold through the mail, saying "We have virtually eliminated that horrible mail order obscenity business. Imagine the indiscriminate mailing of hard core pornography into American homes?"One victim of the government's crackdown on adult mail-order businesses was the fledgling Adam & Eve, as related in Philip D. Harvey's excellent book, The Government Vs. Erotica.
But Barr left the AG’s job several years before the advent of the World Wide Web made online porn readily and available to anyone with an internet connection.
Patrick Trueman, former head of the Justice Department Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, also praised Barr for expanding his focus beyond illegal child pornography, and aggressively attacking mainstream porn involving adults as well.
“He didn’t take the easy route, which is just to prosecute child pornography,” Trueman told The Examiner. “I have been in his office one-on-one talking about the issue of obscenity, and I can say he was very sincere about it."
Barr himself has been open about his views regarding “obscenity” and other forms of “sexual immorality,” writing in a 1995 article published by the journal The Catholic Lawyer that the purpose of American government should be to impose “a transcendent moral order with objective standards of right and wrong that… flows from God’s eternal law.”
“We have lived through 30 years of permissiveness, the sexual revolution, and the drug culture,” Barr wrote, as quoted by The Daily Beast. “We have had unprecedented violence. We have had soaring juvenile crime, widespread drug addiction, and skyrocketing venereal diseases.”
In the article, Barr condemned “secularists” who “through legislative action, litigation, or judicial interpretation... continually seek to eliminate laws that reflect traditional moral norms... chipping away at laws designed to restrain sexual immorality, obscenity, or euthanasia.”
But Hustler publisher Larry Flynt said that Barr poses a threat to the porn industry, saying, "they can’t keep our streets clean, so they want to keep our minds pure by dictating our reading habits.”
Free Speech Coalition spokesperson Mike Stabile told the Examiner that Trump’s appointment of Barr could be a way for Trump to draw attention away from his own connections to porn, such as his affair with AVN Hall of Famer Stormy Daniels.
"We've long worried that Trump's anxiety about his porn connections would cause him to over-correct,” Stabile said. “After all, what better way to distract evangelicals and anti-porners from your relationship to porn and porn stars than to attack it?”
Photo By C-SPAN/Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
