A whole bunch of Republican-run, fundamentalist states have passed new laws design to safeguard your moral purity and make sure that, if you do watch porn, government knows what, when and who’s watching.
Utah, Louisiana, Virginia, Mississippi and Arkansas all passed such laws (including, in some states, requirement for government-run age identification), and the newest one is S.B. No.2021 in Texas, which requires not just the age verification (fyi, all legitimate porn sites already require some form of age and/or identity verification), but also a big, scary pseudoscientific warning they pretty much pulled whole out of their asses – and according to the Free Speech Coalition, they can shove it right back in, sideways.
Oh, and nipples are now on the list of pornographic material, if you wondered. Guess all those European beach destinations and breastfeeding communities will have to clam up.
Why? For the same reason they’re targeting LGBTQ+ communities and drag queens. For the same reason witches and “heretics” were burned and we had reefer madness and communist witch hunts in the 50s and 60s. For the same reason the immigrants are continuously targeted by the right. For the same reason Nazis targeted identical targets – queer, trans, gay, immigrants & adult. If you have a country plagued by economic difficulties, drum up discontent with democratically elected government, then choose a target, preferably a minority or one that has little support or means to defend itself, create a hysteria around it, and you can whip it up to pretend you’re solving social issues and gain power.
It worked in Iran and Afghanistan, where people voted to voluntarily put the yoke of fundamentalist dictators on their necks in the name of “morality” and “family values”. We all see how well that worked out. Will it work here? Remains to be seen. I hope not… But it depends on all of us.
