Last year, the rightwing think-tank the Heritage Foundation launched Project 2025, which laid out much of the policy blueprint for the current Trump administration. One of the project’s espoused goals was to permanently criminalize all pornography. Now, a Republican senator with kind words for Trump has introduced a bill that would do just that.
Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) recently introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA), which would effectively criminalize all pornography nationwide by legally redefining what it means to be obscene. For years, “obscenity” has been all but a defunct legal category that narrowly defines speech that remains unprotected by the First Amendment. Lee would explode this legal category, expanding it to encompass virtually all visual representations of sex.
According to the bill text, “a picture, image, graphic image file, film, videotape, or other visual depiction” of any media that “appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion” would be considered criminal. In other words, if you have an old VHS tape of some Cinemax-style smut stashed away in your garage, you could, under this law, be considered to be harboring deeply illicit materials. Some critics have suggested that Lee’s definition of obscenity is so ridiculously broad that it could effectively criminalize Game of Thrones. That said, the punishments for merely possessing porn under the proposed law seem unclear at this point, as the legislation seems more focused on punishing the creators and distributors of racy material.
The law would “pave the way for the prosecution of obscene content disseminated across state lines or from foreign countries and open the door to federal restrictions or bans regarding online porn,” The Daily Caller writes.
“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,” said Lee, in a press release about the bill. “Our bill updates the legal definition of obscenity for the internet age so this content can be taken down and its peddlers prosecuted.”
Lee’s view of pornography hews closely to that of the Heritage Foundation, which has similarly sought to crush the smut industry. In its Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025 defines pornography as the “omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children” and argues that the “people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned” and that “telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
It should be noted that porn has always been a hot-button issue and that critics have long tried to criminalize it. The history of the anti-pornography movement in the U.S. is a long and complicated one, littered with differing ideological justifications and strange bedfellows. In recent years, however, the anti-porn crusade has largely been led by the MAGA right.
Much of the modern anti-porn movement has sought to focus on the harmful psychological impact that pornography may have on young web users and children. It has targeted online access to porn by instituting age-verification requirements for porn websites that bar underage users. Over the past decade, over a dozen states have passed legislation designed to curb youth access to porn, much of which is still being challenged in court.
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