Op-Ed: What Is Porn? The Distorted Notions in Utah and Beyond

SALT LAKE CITY—Pornhub geo-blocked the state of Utah after Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, signed a new age verification bill into law. The porn site took this action on May 2, with the news going viral and being reported in international news outlets. Interestingly enough, the reaction from the outside world was quite comical. But from within Utah, people are pissed. Writing for the Salt Lake City Weekly, this author wrote on the impacts of age verification from a freedom of expression perspective. The impact is going to be negative given that the geo-block in Utah is a warning of what could happen in other states that have age verification laws in place that require some form of identity certification for users looking to watch porn. Utah is the global headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormonism. Among some of the more traditionalist communions of Christianity, the LDS Church has significant power over the elected Republicans currently in office. Gov. Cox is a Mormon, for instance. While this commentary is by no means intended as a tirade against an entire religion, it is important to highlight the spiritual underpinnings of Utah's legislature, because the state heralds itself as a national leader in regulating adult content. Utah was the first state to declare that pornography is a public health crisis. Other Republican-held states followed Utah’s lead, adopting similar resolutions with no clear evidence of porn consumption being a threat to physical or mental health, public safety or national stability. This resulted in 16 states holding this view. Though it may be controversial and far from perfect in economic terms, it's important to note that the adult entertainment industry is legal and dutifully regulated by companies within the industry and through governmental requirements such as the U.S.C. §§2257 record-keeping law. And, for the anti-porn crowd to say otherwise is not only intellectually short-sighted but demonstrates that they are willfully ignorant regarding the ethical and legal commitments upon which several adult-oriented companies build their brands. Organizations such as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) or Evangelical church-aligned Exodus Cry claim they're “experts” in fighting sexual and child exploitation in mainstream sexual culture. But, time and time again, these groups show that they literally lack knowledge (or, the willingness to obtain such knowledge) of the role of sexuality in culture, including pornography in society. For example, NCOSE has earned millions off of its continued grift of claiming that pornography is a public health crisis. And, yes, it is a grift. Every year, NCOSE publishes its “dirty dozen” mainstream enablers of sexual exploitation. There is absolutely nothing credible about these lists, and they effectively render NCOSE a crackpot conspiracy group. One year, NCOSE named the American Library Association to its “dirty dozen.” The American Library Association (ALA) is a national nonprofit advocacy group representing librarians and public libraries. It responded by doubling down on its advocacy for intellectual freedom. James LaRue, the then-director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, wrote for the Journal of Intellectual Freedom & Privacy that “NCOSE’s view is that sexual content, of any description, is dangerous and should be proscribed. This is the perspective of censorship. Librarians oppose it, as we should.” Groups like NCOSE manage to grab the ears of religious elected officials, like Utah state Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, and present them with half baked ideas about regulating pornography. By doing so, their distorted ideologies now openly influence entire governmental institutions in all elements of American governance. Weiler is a high-profile social conservative and is regarded as an up-and-coming leader in the Utah Republican Party. But, Weiler isn’t really anyone special. The majority of Americans disagree with his worldview, even when he and his fellow social conservatives across the country wish to censor First Amendment-protected forms of speech in the name of “protecting children.” Protecting children is a nothing but a bullshit red herring. The present GOP has a fixation on defining something as pornographic in order to ban it. LaRue pointed out that NCOSE saw the term “pornography” as a generic one, and not a legal term within the context of a term like “obscenity.”  This was observed in 2018. Fast forward to 2023, and a surge of far-right populism among the Republicans—spurred, in part, by former President Donald Trump’s stolen election conspiracy claims—has resulted in a debate on what is considered pornographic and obscene as it relates to curriculum in schools, books that can be accessed in school and public libraries, and acceptable expression in the public square. NCOSE and other groups have contributed to a moral panic over a so-called far-left conspiracy to turn the youth in the United States into “woke robots” doing the bidding of a shadowy cabal of leftist elites.  As a result of QAnon conspiracies gaining traction during the global COVID-19 pandemic, crackpot groups like the far-right Moms for Liberty had a new voice in a new chapter of the ongoing culture wars playing out in the United States. The group started because a gaggle of pissed off Florida moms were sick of their kids being stuck at home during the pandemic. After railing about vaccinations and mask mandates, the group shifted its focus to school libraries and curriculum. Quickly, Moms for Liberty grew into a national organization with over 70,000 members and about 200 chapters crashing school board meetings and threatening administrators for teaching comprehensive sexual education, LGBTQ inclusion, and critical race theory. In 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center named Moms for Liberty an anti-government hate group targeting policies working to include students of all backgrounds, sexual orientation and ethnicity. Moms for Liberty is noteworthy because the group has in part advocated for book bans on a scale that is reminiscent of Adolf Hitler directing Nazi soldiers to burn books he viewed as subversive. For example, a high profile case occurred in 2021 when a Florida chapter for the national far-right “parental rights” organization lobbied a local school board to remove 51 titles from school libraries they viewed as pornographic or sexually explicit. Now, book bans are popular among conservative lawmakers at the federal and state level. And to get back to Utah, there is a parallel issue at hand there that really drives home the central point here: A grassroots group that is aligned ideologically with Moms for Liberty recently demonstrated in front of the state capitol building in Salt Lake City as a response to a nearby school district banning the Holy Bible in elementary and middle schools. This came after an anonymous parent, frustrated by the national efforts to ban materials, argued that the Bible is too vulgar and violent for certain age groups. The Book of Mormon, a new testament of Jesus Christ interacting with ancient inhabitants on the North American continent that was read out of a hat off of gold plates by LDS founder Joseph Smith, could also be banned on the same grounds. This all comes full circle. The Republican super-majority in the Utah legislature passed a controversial law during the 2022 legislative session that banned books deemed “pornographic or indecent” from the state’s school libraries. The lawmaker behind the measure, state Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, called the act of the Bible being banned a “rogue” move by the school district in question, Davis School District, right outside of Salt Lake City. He then walked back his criticism of the school board banning the Bible by saying that “all instructional materials” should be reviewed regardless of the subject matter. Ivory shot himself in the foot, as did the other conservatives who only supported the book ban measure because conservative groups saw certain books as inappropriate. Unfortunately, the targeted texts were LGBTQ-related materials to which these groups are ideologically opposed. Irony isn’t even an accurate word to describe what’s going on in Utah. What’s happening in Utah is happening in states all over the country that are under the rule of governors and lawmakers who truly believe that young adult novels, like the critically-acclaimed Freedom Writers Diary or illustrator Maia Kobabe’s award-winning graphic novel Gender Queer: A Memoir, are tantamount to porn that you would find on a tube site or a membership site. This is the furthest thing from sound logic.  So, what is porn? There may be no hard-and-fast answer. But, books for young adults it is not. And, with this twisted belief, right-wing lawmakers all over the country are threatening not only the freedoms of expression that students are entitled to but the protected forms of speech that enable the adult industry to flourish and produce content that is fun, cathartic, sexy, educational, ethical, consensual and (above all else) legal. Image by Sam Williams from Pixabay