Senator Mike Lee from Utah introduced a new bill that aims to ban pornography and clearly define obscenity.
In a press release, Lee’s team shared that his Interstate Obscenity Definition Act will clearly define obscenity and allow law enforcement officers to “more easily” prosecute it when it is transmitted across state lines.
It will define obscenity within the Communications Act of 1934 as content that “taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion; depicts, describes or represents actual or simulated sexual acts with the objective intent to arouse, titillate, or gratify the sexual desires of a person, and; taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
Furthermore, it notes that it removes “the ‘intent’ requirement that only prohibits the transmission of obscenity for the purposes abusing, threatening, or harassing a person.”
Commenting on the bill, Lee said, “Obscenity isn’t protected by the First Amendment, but hazy and unenforceable legal definitions have allowed extreme pornography to saturate American society and reach countless children. Our bill updates the legal definition of obscenity for the internet age so this content can be taken down and its peddlers prosecuted.”
U.S. Representative Mary Miller from Illinois who introduced a House version of the bill also stated, “The Interstate Obscenity Definition Act equips law enforcement with the tools they need to target and remove obscene material from the internet, which is alarmingly destructive and far outside the bounds of protected free speech under the Constitution. I’m proud to lead this effort in the House with Senator Lee to safeguard American families and ensure this dangerous material is kept out of our homes and off our screens.”
As Miller notes pornography is indeed dangerous material. Rachel Anne Barr, the co-Director of Georgetown University’s Department of Psychology found back in 2019 that “researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany, found that higher porn use correlated with less brain activation in response to conventional pornographic imagery. This explains why users tend to graduate to more extreme and unconventional forms of porn. Pornhub analytics reveal that conventional sex is decreasingly interesting to users and is being replaced by themes like incest and violence.”
Barr also notes there are a number of other negatives when it comes to people who watch pornography, “Porn consumers report greater depressive systems, lower quality of life and poorer mental health compared to those who don’t watch porn.”
She also states, “Porn use has been correlated with erosion of the prefrontal cortex — the region of the brain that houses executive functions like morality, willpower and impulse control. … Damage to the prefrontal cortex in adulthood is termed hypofrontality, which predisposes an individual to behave compulsively and make poor decisions.”
Dr. Chad Pecknold, a Professor at Catholic University, also notes that pornography can not be defended as free speech. He explained to Catholic Answers, “What is pornography? What drives pornography? Why does pornography exist? It exists for pure and simple reason of masturbation, self-abuse. At the heart, why does all this pornography exist? You could say, well, it’s technology, but that’s a kind of instrumental cause where at the heart of it’s the notion that we should be free to pursue any pleasure that we want.”
“A sexual licentiousness that we should be able to… And we will not like this idea, because everything in our society has told us that people should be free to do whatever they want in their bedrooms or people should be free to do whatever they want to do with their bodies, my body, my choice, but masturbation is self-abuse,” he continued. “It is the misuse of your freedom.”
“And so, pornography is built on that,” Pecknold said. “It’s built on the misuse of freedom. It’s built on this misuse of freedom, and then what happens? It begins to degrade all the social bonds. It begins to degrade women, it degrades men, it begins to degrade the social bonds, it begins to touch our children. It used to be that the pornography was up on the top shelf in the shop, but now it’s in everybody’s pockets, and so your four-year-old can see it. And so, you see that this false view of liberty that has infected our view of sex then comes in and creates… This false view of liberty creates the demand for masturbation and for pornography, and breaks down the social bonds, and then we then try to view it through this other lens of liberty as license in the realm of speech, and it’s completely confusing to us. We think, ‘Well, is that free speech or isn’t it free speech?’”
“It’s not ordered to goodness, it’s not ordered to truth, so it can’t be counted as free speech, but then it’s also just a category mistake because it’s not speech,” he noted. “It’s actually the promotion of self-abuse and the promotion of self-abuse leads to the abuse of others, including the abuse of our families and our marriages. That’s my answer is that this is actually all tied to what Leo condemned as liberalism’s false notion of liberty, liberty as license, rather than liberty is ordered to truth.”
What do you make of Lee’s bill?
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When porn is literally used as a weapon by our greatest ally, it's time to ban it.
Ban it all. Free speech is a lie. It's blasphemous trash intended to trap our children into a life of debauchery and slavery to the devil. My only question is if the language about artistic value would leave things too open. But yeah, no problem with a blanket porn ban. It's evil and used to control people and keep them weak.