This builds off our discussions of Miller v California, and conservatism - at the very least.
- Click here for the article.
Social conservatives are ready to launch a new national war on pornography.
It’s been nearly 50 years since the Nixon administration’s “War on Porn” and more than two decades since the signing of the Communications Decency Act, the first major federal effort to regulate online pornography. But pornography continues to be a target of Republicans at the state level; in addition, the 2016 Republican Party platform stated that “pornography, with its harmful effects, especially on children, has become a public health crisis that is destroying the lives of millions.”
This fall, Republican members of Congress asked the Department of Justice to “declare prosecution of obscene pornography a criminal justice priority.” Conservative commentators also argue that government power can — and should — put a stop to pornography for the benefit of the “common good.” By doing so, social conservatives argue that they can alter American culture itself.
Terry Schilling, executive director of the American Principles Project, a conservative think tank, argued in October in the Catholic magazine First Things that efforts to regulate pornography are part of a broader phenomenon. “In our time, a new conservatism is being born — one less interested in managing our nation’s decline than in using political power to promote virtue, public morality, and the common good,” he wrote. “Conservatives need to overcome their fear of governing the nation that elected them.”
In doing so, social conservatives are facing opposition from libertarians as well as fellow conservatives. They argue that efforts to ban or otherwise tighten regulations on pornography is the kind of overreach they have long stood against.
As Reason Magazine editor-in-chief Katherine Mangu-Ward told me, “What you’re seeing now is this rise of a much more authoritarian and state-oriented variant of conservatism and it just says, ‘You know what? Actually, never mind. Let’s take away the bad choices. Let’s make some bad choices illegal.’ This has long been a characteristic of the American left.”
