Taking the Anti-Porn Show on the Road

Lessons for a Conservative Counter-revolution

This week, I was honored to speak at the Danube Institute’s conference on “Family Formation and the Future,” in breathtaking Budapest. The conference featured a star-studded lineup (among the names you might recognize: Erika Bachiochi, Patrick Brown, Tim Carney, Miriam Cates, Mary Harrington, Spencer Klavan, Mark Krikorian, Heather Mac Donald, John O’Sullivan, Catherine Pakaluk, Louise Perry, Emma Waters, Brad Wilcox, as well as a couple of ambassadors and some eminent Hungarian speakers), and I was so blessed by the opportunity to learn from them and converse with them about the urgent challenges confronting the family—the building block of society.

I will be sharing some of my thoughts from the conference—especially those highlighting the birth dearth and the threat of demographic winter—in a column for WORLD next week. In my own talk, however, I was asked to focus on one of the root causes of the current crisis of family formation—the pornography epidemic—and how conservatives are building an unlikely coalition to resist it. My full remarks below:

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We’re here today to discuss family policy—that is to say, what policymakers can do to encourage the formation, fertility, and stability of families. In recent years, many social conservatives have pivoted away from an older emphasis on so-called “family values” toward simply valuing families as such. Rather than agitating against public vice and indecency, and highlighting the wreckage left by each fresh wave of the sexual revolution, they’ve made the more modest appeal that society should support those who wish to get married and start families. Rather than warning of moral collapse, they’ve warned of demographic collapse; and instead of vice laws, they have called for tax breaks.

Now, there are good reasons for this pivot. Moderns don’t like being preached at, and social conservatives seemed doomed to lose every moral battle they dared engage in the public square. Better to shift the debate to more neutral, secular ground, with hard numbers and sociological data. Plus, the demographic crisis has become impossible to ignore in recent years. Just getting people to start having children again seems more important than what these children are exposed to.

All fair enough, and yet, I would warn, one-sided and short-sighted. For the problem of family formation is more a cultural than an economic one. People will not marry, stay married, and have children unless they have internalized a hierarchy of values radically at odds with the sexual revolution. And it matters what sort of world we bring our children into—if it is one that ravages their souls and commodifies their bodies, they may find themselves ruing the day they were born. (Indeed, teen suicides today are at the highest point in history.)

Conservatives, then, cannot afford to ignore the scourge of pornography, crusades against which were long a mainstay of the Moral Majority movement in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Needless to say, the today’s porn makes the Playboy centerfolds of yesteryear look like child’s play. In place of still images are 4K films. In place of nudes are hard-core sex scenes featuring every kind of degradation one can imagine—and many that one simply cannot imagine—from incest and bestiality to gang-rape scenes. Through platforms like OnlyFans, porn has become live and interactive, a thriving industry of legalized digital prostitution. You don’t have to go to seedy stores to access this material, but just to reach into your pocket. And for this reason, the greatest horror of modern pornography is that it has become child’s play—the average age of first exposure is now 11, with many children already addicted to violent pornography by the time they are 8 or 9.

There is no greater enemy to family formation and stability. Pornography destroys marriages, and keeps marriages from forming in the first place as young men prefer to find sexual satisfaction in effortless online encounters than in the commitment to an embodied woman, and as young women, traumatized by the abusive sex that porn has taught them to expect, dare not entrust themselves to such a relationship. Even more fundamentally, though, porn’s colonization of childhood has warped the very foundations of family life by dissolving the boundary of childhood and adulthood, which is essential to the foundations of a healthy civilization.

Society once understood that there were certain places that only adults could go, certain conversations only adults could be a part of, and certain activities only adults could engage in. Because young humans, like young plants or animals, are fragile while still developing, we recognize the need to shelter and support them in special ways, to increase their chance of emerging into adulthood strong and mature. In other words, if we cannot guard childhood as childhood, neither will we have adulthood as we have known it, and as civilization requires it: fully-developed agents capable of restraining their desires, making commitments and following through on them, and distinguishing fantasy from reality.

In the physical world, if you want to attend a concert, you’ll have to travel to the location and get in through the door, which might be difficult if there’s a bouncer. However, you can access a website from anywhere, at any time—and generally, whatever your age. This last has been perhaps the most culturally significant feature of the internet.

The Wild West of the Internet

In the early days of the internet, Congress, therefore tried to take steps to ensure that this new virtual world developed with some semblance to the physical world, by requiring the creation of age-gated spaces. Although the first such attempt in 1996 was stricken down by the Supreme Court, Justice O’Connor noted that the basic aspiration behind the law was laudable and that, as soon as the technology could catch up, it would be desirable “to construct barriers in cyberspace and use them to screen for identity, making cyberspace more like the physical world and, consequently, more amenable to zoning laws.”

Although optimistic that this “transformation of cyberspace was already underway” in 1997, she failed to realize that without strong legal nudging, the incentive structures for the burgeoning internet industry pointed all in the other direction: the fewer barriers to the flow of people, information, and yes, pornography around the internet, the more money there was to be made. Thus, when a second Congressional effort finally made its way to the Supreme Court in 2004, the Court deemed, in a narrow 5-4 decision, that the technology still was not suitable for age verification, which would impose an intolerable privacy burden on adult users.

The result was that, for the next two decades, the internet developed along a radically different track from the physical world—an unbounded, largely unregulated space where children could easily participate in adult conversations and activities. This might not have been so terrible if the digital world itself had remained an enclosed realm that was hard to enter, as it had been in the 1990s. But with the advent of smartphones in 2007, and many parents’ short-sighted rush to purchase them, any barrier between digital and physical worlds came crashing down in a hurry. The result? Jonathan Haidt calls it a “screen-based childhood,” but that is a misnomer. For it wasn’t a childhood at all, a concept that, as we have seen, presumes boundaries between child and adult experiences. Children were, instead, immediately accelerated into the adult world—whether the merely disorienting and overwhelming networks of social media, or the darkest and most disturbing corners of the adult world, like online pornography. As a result, they were robbed of childhood—their brains, unprepared for such experiences, were hijacked and their development stunted.

The Tide Begins to Turn

Now, thus far I’ve told a gloomy story, a story so gloomy that social conservatives could be forgiven for simply throwing in the towel on “family values” and focusing on more plausible political priorities like child tax credits. By 2021, when OnlyFans stars were colonizing every corner of social media with their peep shows, the pornification of our culture seemed the ultimate one-way ratchet, with the only possible refuge of parents being so-called “Postman pledge” enclaves. But all that has at last begun to change.

Over just the past two years, a new movement in defense of childhood has exploded onto the scene. More and more parents and policymakers from across the political spectrum have realized that the only way to protect it is to force the digital realm to begin to roughly mimic the kinds of boundaries between adult and child spaces and experiences that exist in the physical world. As of today, 21 states in the US have passed laws requiring robust, secure age verification measures on pornographic websites and 16 more states are currently working on such laws. Another 3 states have enacted age verification requirements to open a social media account. Utah recently became the first state in the country to require age verification for accessing a smartphone app store, and close to a dozen other states are working on similar laws. Similar developments have gained traction internationally, from France to Australia.

The tech industry and porn industries have fought back tooth and nail, recognizing that its massive profit margins depend on addicting customers when they’re young, and maintaining a maximally frictionless experience for all ages. They fought one law, Texas’s HB 1181, all the way to the Supreme Court this year. A decision in that case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, is set to be handed down very soon, and could prove one of the most important cases in the history of the internet. At stake was not just one law, nor indeed just the 18 other similar state laws, nor indeed merely minors’ access to online pornography. At stake was a principle: can we start zoning the internet to protect childhood?

The Case before the Court

The case came before the Court on appeal from the Fifth Circuit, which had not only ruled in Texas’s favor, but—quite surprisingly to many legal analysts—had argued that it was barely even a question; of course Texas had a right to require age verification for pornography. After all, minors had no constitutional right to such material, and although age verification might be a bit of an inconvenience for adults, it hardly amounted to a meaningful “burden” on their access to speech. (Truthfully, adults have no constitutional right to access most of this material either, but that is a battle for another day.) Thus, the law only had to meet the broad standard of “rational basis,” as did similar age-gating laws on brick-and-mortar businesses. In the 2004 Ashcroft decision, the Court had ruled that age verification did meaningfully burden adult access, and thus triggered “strict scrutiny”—a burden that can only be met by showing that there is no other “less restrictive means” of achieving the “compelling government interest.” The porn industry has always maintained that parental control software was a less restrictive but perfectly adequate means of getting the job done, an argument that five Supreme Court justices bought in 2004.

In my own amicus brief, co-authored with my colleague Clare Morell, we argued that this was poppycock; parental controls were woefully inadequate in the current shape of the internet. Ours was one of twenty-seven filed by a coalition we helped mobilize—from the feminist Women’s Liberation Front to the anti-sex-trafficking group Exodus Cry, to the American Foundation for Addiction Research, to more traditional religious conservative groups like the Family Policy Alliance and the Latter-day Saints.

Even though we were excited by the size and scope of the coalition that came together, we tried to manage our expectations, since most veteran legal observers took a dim view of Texas’s prospects. The porn industry has had an almost unbroken string of triumphs before the Supreme Court over the past four decades, and even many conservatives expected the justices to slap down the Fifth Circuit’s ruling as a fundamental break with precedent.

What Happened at the Court

However, during oral arguments in January, the justices shocked almost everyone by pummeling the porn industry from start to finish. Many justices seemed willing to revisit fundamental precedents and begin subjecting online vendors to the same age verification requirements as liquor stores and nightclubs.

Three things were particularly striking:

1. The porn industry’s line throughout this litigation has been that, while of course kids probably shouldn’t watch this stuff, there’s no evidence at all of serious mental health issues related to it, and that talk of “porn addiction” is fanciful pseudo-science. However, not a single justice questioned that youth porn exposure is a public health crisis requiring urgent government action. Whereas the District Court judge in the case had seemed to accept that the pornography in question consisted of little more than R-rated movies on Netflix, the justices (educated, perhaps, by deeply disturbing details in the amicus briefs) knew better.

2. Not a single justice seemed interested in the porn lobby's argument that “content filtering”/parental controls can get the job done just fine. It helps to have parents in high places—the very first question was asked by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who as a mom, knew better than to accept this fatuous argument. This is really quite extraordinary though, given how large filters loomed in the Ashcroft majority decision and the fact that the porn industry has made them the centerpiece of its argument: “by all means protect kids, but parents can do that just fine with existing software.” Most parents know better, and thank goodness, so do the justices it seems.

3. Many justices openly acknowledged that rapid technological change calls for reconsideration of precedent, with Chief Justice John Roberts perhaps being most explicit on this subject. Again, this seems obvious to many of us, but the Court has generally been very hesitant to revisit precedent and has sometimes seemed a bit oblivious to the rapidly-changing technological realities. Not anymore.

It thus seemed that a solid majority of justices felt some kind of AV legislation along these lines should be able to survive constitutional scrutiny; the only questions were whether the details of Texas’s law might need some tweaking, and whether the case could be fit into prior precedent or required directly overturning it.

Nothing is certain, of course; we will have to wait for the justices’ opinions, and should pray for wisdom and a good result. The upshot, however, is this: It seems very likely that the Court will soon hand down a judgement making clear that states will have meaningful room to maneuver on age-zoning the internet from this day forward, for the first time in at least three decades—that is, since America first started going online. If so, it will be a pivotal day in the history of the internet, and a pivotal day in the battle to defend childhood—which is to say, to defend the very future of our society.

Lessons for a Conservative Counter-Revolution

Let me conclude by briefly suggesting three broader lessons from this counter-revolution.

1. Never give up on reality as a lost cause. Reality is stubborn, and though long buried, it will fight back. The porn industry has grown more and more shameless in persuading its lies as “normal,” and regular people are ready to resist.

2. Reality makes unlikely bedfellows. The anti-porn movement can unite radical feminists and trad-wives. It can unite neuroscientists, sociologists, and religious leaders. It can unite parents’ rights advocates and child’s rights advocates. So can other movements.

3. Technology is both foe and friend. Advanced tech is part of what has made porn so pernicious, but even more advanced tech has made secure age verification possible. Technology isn’t going anywhere, so conservatives need to learn how to harness it to secure the future of the family.

Thank you for your time.

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• “The Illusion of Freedom in a Digital Age” (forthcoming event at the Center for Public Christianity in Raleigh, 4/4): I’m about to hop on a plane to Raleigh to present on the intersection of my book on freedom and my recent work on technology. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there!

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