Last week, four Republican members of Congress sent a letter to United States Attorney General William Barr, urging him, as AVN.com reported, to wage a new crackdown on pornography. But that letter was just one element in what appears to be a new, concerted movement by America’s right wing to make banning porn the next front in pro-Trump conservatives' culture war,, according to an NBCNews.com report on Monday.
Over the past few years, AVN.com has reported regularly on countries that have banned, or at least seriously contemplated government regulation of, sexually-oriented adult content. India slapped a ban on hundreds of online porn sites starting in October of 2018, joining China, South Korea, Nepal and other Asian countries that now have some form of anti-porn measures in place.
Outside of Asia, the United Kingdom attempted to mandate that internet providers block all adult sites for anyone under the age of 18, but after two years and the equivalent of $2.5 million in expenditures, had to abandon the effort due to a long series of technical problems and privacy concerns.
But that failure has apparently not served as a deterrent for New Zealand, Australia, and Republic of Ireland, all of which are currently contemplating similar legislation.
Under President Richard Nixon, the United States declared “war on porn” about 50 years ago, with Nixon pledging, “So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life.”
Instead, the 1970s became the “golden age” of American porn—but now that porn is more accessible than any previous era, on the internet, Republicans and social conservatives want Donald Trump to become the standard bearer in a new anti-porn crackdown, according to the NBC article.
Trump in 2016 became the first Republican candidate to run on a party platform that included a specific anti-porn plank—at the same time that Trump was, as has since been revealed, secretly arranging a hush money payoff to AVN Hall of Fame porn performer Stormy Daniels to silence her from discussing a sexual encounter with Trump 10 years earlier.
Some right-wing writers have been explicit in their advocacy of using “political power” to impose their personal “morality” on the country at large.
In October, according to a Vox.com report, Terry Schilling, director of the right wing American Principles Project, wrote that “conservatism” must use that power to “promote virtue, public morality, and the common good. Conservatives need to overcome their fear of governing the nation that elected them.”
Schilling proposed an age-verification system similar to the one that failed to get off the ground in the United Kingdom, in which internet providers would be required to offer a “default” porn-free internet, with adult sites accessible only to those who can somehow prove that they are of legal age.
In a New York Post op-ed last week, the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper’s opinion editor, Sohrab Ahmari, wrote that Schilling’s proposal to restrict access to porn would not only pass Constitutional muster, but that the Founding Fathers would react to online porn “with tar and feathers.” (He was wrong.)
Photo By The White House / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
