Last week the National Conservatism Conference in Washington D.C. hosted a “Big Tech and Big Porn” panel. If ever there were two polar opposites on a particular issue, “Big Porn,” and National Conservatism are at the widest possible ends of this particular spectrum. So, how did this panel ever come to be? The simple answer, age verification legislation. At that panel a spokesperson for the Ethics and Public Policy Center confirmed their support for the current age verification laws promoted by religious conservatives and confirmed that these laws mark the first steps toward the center's end-goal – to ban porngraphy outright.
Attendees of the National Conservatism Conference revealed plans to ban pornography nationwide, proposing jail-time for porn producers.
Not that anyone should be surprised by this revelation. Conservatives have never been quiet about their feelings on pornography.
From calls of American conservatives to avoid porn altogether, to the oft-heard castigation of hetero men and their supposed rampant libidos (at one point Michigan State University law professor Adam Candeub decried “Bad men, bad male libido,”) the assembled reveled in their usual anti-porn/anti-freedom rhetoric, which these groups have been touting for years.
The anti-sex future Conservatives want to see
It should also come as no surprise that there was a large contingent of supporters of the Heritage Foundation in attendance, nor that Heritage Foundation figurehead Paul Dans was at the conference. The American Conservative ‘think’ tank foundation has made its feelings about pornography plain.
Indeed, in the foundation's infamous, and massive, Project 2025 policy proposal states that pornography, “has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
Emotive phrases like “purveyors are child predators,” “misogynistic exploiters of women,” and “as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime” surely reveal that the Heritage Foundation, and seemingly the people attending this conference, wholeheartedly believe in the quest to ban pornography.
Sarah Jones, a senior writer for Intelligencer, reported that this fourth installment of the conference carried with it the patina of “an explicit obsession with white Christian fertility,” and that the subject seemed to “animate” the attendant crowd more than most others. Again, no surprise here either. The panel speakers’ tendrils snake deep into the conservative scene, from federalist groups and the Republican party to conservative news sites and right-wing university instructors.
Beyond this wholesale outlawing, and imprisonment of the producers of pornographic material (maybe even the imprisonment of those who report about it?) Jones reported hearing about a campaign floated during the conference to end casual sex. Surely an extreme position to take given the Bible’s explicit sin of masturbation, a campaign of this type seems, to all reasoned individuals, a fool’s errand at best.
But that’s not to say that the National Conservatism Conference won’t continue to try.
The continuation of a decades-long quest to ban pornography
Although the concern over pornography has risen as much as receded since President Reagan famously ordered a commission in the early 1980s to study explicit materials, producing a report of nearly two thousand pages, of late conservatives seem to have taken up the anti-porn crusade with a frenzy. The reasons behind the current crusade span decades. First renewed in earnest with Rick Santorum’s 2012 presidential campaign call to ban hardcore pornography, the attacks on the most well-known and visible target of conservatives' angst over sex in general have reached a pinnacle in response to what certain groups feel is an overall uptick in the sexualization of our culture.
Driven by a real conservative fear backlash in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriages, the easier dissemination of salacious material via the internet, a worldwide push for transgender rights, and the Republican party’s presumptive nominee making news for sleeping with a porn star, Conservatives are pushing harder than ever to save America from the supposed threat pornography poses.
The future of pornography in America
Right now, there are far too many questions over what exactly Conservatives might be pushing for in this election cycle, and what might come to pass if Donald Trump manages the unprecedented feat of gaining the American Presidency for a second time. Regardless of what might or might not happen with the election, there's no denying Conservatives' feelings about pornography or that they'll continue to fight as hard as they can to ban pornography.
Will they succeed? At this point, no one can know for sure. But the success of age verification laws throughout the country isn't a good sign.
