LA Times Op-Ed: ’War on Porn’ Is Really War on Personal Liberty

Donald Trump, in spite of his personal connections to the adult industry, became in 2016 the first major-party presidential candidate to run on a platform that included a specific plank calling for restrictions on pornography. Since then, a group of Trump’s supporters have attempted to push him into declaring a new “War on Porn.” As AVN.com reported last month, a growing number of newspaper op-ed columns and other publications just in the past several months have attempted to “argue” that conservatives must use their political power to impose standards of “virtue, public morality, and the common good” on the country—an edict that mostly boils down to a ban or at least sharp restrictions on internet porn. But last Friday, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by libertarian writer and Reason magazine editor Matt Welch sounding an alarm about the new calls for a crackdown on porn.  The “War on Porn,” Welch writes, is at its heart a war on personal freedoms. “Emboldened conservatives are trying to use the Trump moment to steer the GOP firmly away from its commitments to individual liberty,” he wrote in the op-ed titled “Conservatives are coming for your Pornhub.” Welch cites a “manifesto” published by the Trumpian right-wing site First Things, which attacked non-Trump-supporting conservatives for supposedly “fetishizing” individual “autonomy.” In a disturbingly Orwellian twist, the “manifesto” declared that personal liberty is, in fact, not  liberty at all, but “tyranny.” “These are the same people who also brought us a whole damn month last year of internecine conservative warfare over drag-queen story hour,” Welch remarks in his L.A. Times essay. “They consider your constitutional objections to be about as relevant as stopping a tidal wave with a slide rule.” Welch also warned that the Trumpian conservatives are willing to partner with the “puritans of the left,” as happened with last year’s passage of the FOSTA/SESTA “anti-sex trafficking” law that has accomplished the opposite of its stated intentions, while leading to a crackdown against free expression online. The bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both the House and Senate. “Trump-era manifesto artists, responding as they are to a democratic upheaval, are seeking to use anti-democratic means to criminalize expression enjoyed by tens of millions,” Welch wrote—warning that the forces fighting the newest War on Porn will not be satisfied by a series of angry manifestos and “strongly worded letters.” “The implications,” he wrote, “will leap from page to prison.” Photo From "Perversion for Profit" YouTube Screen Capture