Porn: Should the government ban it?

“Of all the stats that keep parents up at night, the one that haunts me most often is this: My toddler son is likely to encounter internet porn before puberty,” said Sohrab Ahmari in the New York Post. So, I was heartened when four Republican members of Congress this month sent a letter to Attorney General Bill Barr urging him to start enforcing America’s long-dormant obscenity laws and make prosecuting pornographers a “criminal justice priority.” Young people increasingly learn about sex through online porn, warping their idea of sexuality and instilling in them violent and degrading attitudes toward women. For many, it becomes an all-consuming addiction. And “given the billions of videos and images” now available online, there is no way viewers can tell if the performers they are watching were “trafficked, coerced, or otherwise exploited.”

“Social conservatives should be careful what they wish for,” said Casey Given in Washington Examiner.com. Handing the government the power to ban or restrict access to things you don’t like almost always backfires. It’s easy to imagine future Democratic administrations “deeming so-called hate speech from conservatives as also ‘obscene.’” We conservatives shouldn’t rely on big government to fight porn. Churches and schools can do more to educate people about porn’s negative effects, and families can pressure technology companies for stronger parental controls. Turning America “into a Christian version of Saudi Arabia” isn’t conservative, it’s “dystopian.” Banning porn won’t make it go away, said Elizabeth Nolan Brown in Reason.com. It would only drive it underground, into the hands of organized crime. Prohibition always fails.

The debate over pornography is actually a debate about “what conservatism even is,” said Jane Coaston in Vox.com. Should conservatives focus on advancing personal liberty and free markets, even if it means easily accessible porn viewed by tens of millions every day? Or should the Right use government for remaking the culture to reflect traditional mores? Feeling empowered by the influence they wield within the Trump administration, social conservatives are arguing that libertarians’ influence “has caused the Right to ignore moral questions and focus too much on economics as an indicator of national well-being.” That disagreement leaves conservatives standing at a crossroads, with stakes that “are a lot bigger than they might seem.”