‘Daily Caller’: Govt Must Deny Funds to States Where Porn Is Made

The conservative political news and opinion site the Daily Caller on Wednesday published an essay titled “How To Nuke The Porn Industry And Save The American Family” in which writer Zack Slayback proposes a new and particularly alarming “solution” to what Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang recently termed the “real problem” of “rampant” porn. According to Slayback, a “a venture capital and private equity professional,” the United States government should target states that serve as hubs of porn production by withholding federal funds until they begin “cracking down on pornography production and distribution.” The Daily Caller writer says that Medicare funding to California and Florida, two states he identifies as locations where “most pornography is produced,” should be held back until the states take measures to shut down the adult industry—holding the senior citizen populations of those states hostage to the supposed “pro-family policy” advocated by Slayback.  “Tying Medicare funding to cracking down on pornography production and distribution would be no small incentive for states with such large aging populations,” he writes. And what would such a crackdown look like? According to the author, “States should seize and liquidate the assets of professional pornography studios and use the funds to support family programs and work assistance helping former performers reintegrate into the workforce.” But wouldn’t these draconian measures against the adult video production industry violate the First Amendment? Despite longstanding ambiguity over what constitutes non-protected “obscenity,” courts have repeatedly ruled that pornography is a form of free expression and is therefore shielded from such heavy-handed government actions by the U.S. Constitution. But Slayback simply dismisses the court decisions by declaring that “porn is not speech. It is fundamentally different than media protected as speech.” According to Slayback, “Unlike a Scorsese film or a newspaper, both of which are consumed for artistic enjoyment or enlightenment, pornography is consumed with an outside end in mind: orgasm and masturbation.” Instead, Slayback writes, porn is a “health and human services issue,” following the same reasoning used by at least 15 states that, as AVN.com has reported, have passed official resolutions declaring porn a “public health crisis,” in an attempt to take porn out of the First Amendment arena and create a pseudo-medical rationale for regulating it out of existence. Slayback’s article for the conservative site appears to be part of a growing movement to “crack down” on porn, following just a day after the first-ever U.S. edition of the 191-year-old British right-wing publication The Spectator greeted readers with an essay titled “The Horror of Big Porn: Why Pornography Apologists are Wrong,” in which right-wing writer Julie Bindel argued that “Porn is a kind of slavery.” Photo By The Naughty American / Wikimedia Commons