We have to keep fighting, unfortunately.

Angry about Twitter censoring outright disinformation from President Trump and others alleging election fraud that isn’t happening and mathematically couldn’t swing the election to help fundraise dollars that actually are going to pay off Trump’s debts, conservatives are flocking to Parler, a social media site that claims to stand for “free speech.”

The exception? Well, there’s more than one. But among them is porn. Same thing on Facebook, where Zuckerberg has painted his decision not to take down Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi groups as a principled commitment to free speech but somehow that right doesn’t extend to breastfeeding mothers.

I had an interesting conversation on Facebook where a friend of mine asked what we’d ask a “smart, educated, and caring” Trump supporter. Among my questions was, do you want to ban porn? A woman chimed in to say she does support banning porn.

Her answer was interesting, and I’m going to quote it in full:

My opposition to porn is for many reasons. I think porn "actors" are often abused and mistreated, if not outright victims of human trafficking, and therefore legalizing, purchasing, and viewing porn all support the abuse of those persons (mostly women and children). I also believe in traditional marriage, and that sex should be between husband and wife only. Porn brings other people into that relationship and is immoral for that reason. It's also addictive and ruins marriages when porn creates sexual expectations that the spouse can't or won't meet. I realize most people in this thread will not agree with my sexual values, but I would hope we could find some common ground in concern over human trafficking and abuse of women and children.

I asked whether it change her mind on banning porn if studies proved:

• Banning porn would create a black market for porn that would make life more dangerous for porn actors (like banning drugs created a black market for drugs which made selling and buying drugs more dangerous)

• Banning porn would actually increase rates of human trafficking

• Porn is less addictive than gambling

• Porn use is not associated with marital dissatisfaction and it actually increases the average person's attraction to their partner

Her response:

There's already a black market for child porn. I don't think that's a good reason to legalize it. I also disagree with that argument for legalizing drugs. I'd rather work on improving our law enforcement techniques to crack down on the black markets.

I'm not a fan of gambling either, particularly when the gambler is risking shared resources and other people (spouse, children, etc.) may be hurt by the loss. Whether porn is more or less addictive than gambling doesn't really matter, they are both addictive and dangerous. That's like saying murder is worse than robbery... ok, sure, but that doesn't mean robbery should be legal.

I've heard from too many people whose marriages were hurt by porn to believe any studies that claimed otherwise. Satisfaction and attraction are both ideas that are difficult to quantify or evaluate in a truly scientific way. Such studies usually rely on self-reporting, which is subjective at best.

There’s so much disheartening in this response. How do you collapse porn/child porn and gambling/robbery? How do you just erase any distinction between voluntary adult behavior you don’t personally like and actual violent coercion? I wrote previously about the problem of the left-wing tendency to collapse anything other than luxury gay space communism into literal slavery. But you see this here on the right as well. The difference is that while the left tries to deal with the fact that sex workers are often pushed into sex work by poverty by eliminating poverty (however ham-fistedly) the right tries to deal with the fact that sex workers are often pushed into sex work by poverty by criminalizing sex work.

When I tried to point out that criminalizing things doesn’t usually make them safer, she just decides that’s not true? “I disagree with that argument for legalizing drugs.” What does that even mean? Does it mean you don’t think criminalizing consensual adult behavior increases violence? Because that’s just factually incorrect. Does it mean you’re fine with increasing violence if it reduces the behavior? Drug prohibition has not meaningfully reduced drug use and decriminalizing drugs has not led to large increases in drug use where it’s been tried. “I'd rather work on improving our law enforcement techniques to crack down on the black markets.” Literally why?

All this makes me more convinced that we’re going to see more pushes to censor and ban pornography in the coming months and years. It boggles the mind that in 2020 “smart, educated, and caring” Trump supporters (this woman was a math teacher before becoming a stay-at-home-mom) want to double down on the Drug War.

Criminalizing drug use has been one of worst human rights atrocities to happen in the 21st Century in the developed world. It has utterly failed on every single level, while leaving a wave of literal dead bodies in its wake. And we still have people in this country who have learned absolutely nothing from it and in fact want to continue mass incarceration, needless overdoses, civil liberties violations, widespread corruption, cartel supporting, and forcing people to deal with dangerous black markets just so adults can’t put certain substances into their bodies? And you’re going to tell me they’re not coming for my porn?

This woman is using the literal same “reasoning” for banning drugs and porn. She doesn’t like it and can point to harms it causes, so it should be illegal, consequences of prohibition itself be damned.

Trump didn’t invent being allergic to empirical evidence that doesn’t support one’s authoritarian impulses. He just exploited it. We didn’t defeat it on Saturday. We just pushed back on it some. Joe “Crime Bill” Biden’s approach to criminal justice has also shown an allergy to empirical evidence that doesn’t support one’s authoritarian impulses. It’s easy to look at all the Election Night decriminalizations and legalizations and conclude the War on Shit Consenting Adults Want to Do With Their Own Bodies is over and everyone knows it was a terrible failure. But it’s not and they don’t. We have to keep fighting, unfortunately.