On Sept. 11, Michigan representatives proposed an internet content ban bill unlike any of the others we've seen: This particularly far-reaching legislation would ban not only many types of online content, but also the ability to legally use any VPN.
The bill, called the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act and advanced by six Republican representatives, would ban a wide variety of adult content online, ranging from ASMR and adult manga to AI content and any depiction of transgender people. It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced.
Main issue I have with this article, and a lot of articles on this topic, is it doesn't address the issue of youth access to porn. I think any semi-intelligent person knows this is a parenting issue, but unfortunately that cat's out of the bag, thanks to the right. "Proliferation of porn" is the '90s crime scare (that never really died) all over again. If a politician or industry expert is speaking against bills like this, their talking points have to include:
- Privacy-respecting alternatives that promise parents that their precious babies won't be able to access that horrible dangerous porn! (I don't argue that porn can't be dangerous, but this is yet another disingenuous right-wing culture (holy) war)
- Addressing that vagueness in the bill sets up the government as morality police (it's right there in the title of the bill, FFS), and NOBODY in a "free" country should ever want that.
- Stop saying it can be bypassed with technology. The VPN ban in this bill is a reaction to talking points like that.
- Recognize and call out that this has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with a religious minority imposing its will on the rest of the country (plenty of recent examples to pull from here).
Unfortunately this is becoming enough of "A Thing" that the left is going to have to, once again, be seen doing "something" about it. So they have to thread a needle of "protecting kids," while respecting the privacy of their parents who want their kids protected and want to look at porn, and protecting businesses that require secure communications.
The trans bit is key here. First that, then anything “promoting homosexuality”. It’s in Project 2025 that the porn bans are about criminalising LGBTQ people and allies.
Oh but they won't stop there. Fascism NEVER stops at the first target.
Trans and gay people to the camps today. Tomorrow interracial couples. The day after that? Anyone looking at interracial porn. We can only imagine where it goes from there, but likely it won't be a return to an imagined 1950's sitcom utopia.
Sure, but the porn laws are specifically about targeting LGBTQ people.
It actually gets worse than I outlined above, because I was in a hurry when I wrote that.
So, you make porn illegal and you define “porn” as anything “pro-LGBTQ”. That’s all books which feature LGBTQ characters, all organisations which support LGBTQ people, all people who are openly LGBTQ themselves.
Now you’ve got a school librarian who purged the books she was told to purge but accidentally missed one. A student checks it out, his parents see it and recognise it, now that librarian is guilty of distributing pornography to a minor. If the book features an LGBTQ character who is a minor, then that librarian is guilty of distributing child pornography.
And that’s not even as worrying as it gets. Because everything above is in Project 2025, but that’s not the entire limit. Over the last couple of years Republican politicians have been floating (and even trying to introduce bills which would actualise) the idea of the punishment for sexual offenses involving minors to be the death penalty. They’re not there yet (and bills have thus far been defeated), but that’s the direction of travel. That’s the end goal. A pseudo-legal framework to justify executing people for being openly LGBTQ (held hands with your girlfriend in public? A 17 year old saw you holding hands. You are now guilty of a sexual offense involving a minor), or anything other than publicly anti-LGBTQ. Off to the camps with you!
So, yes you’re right that they’ll use whatever weapon they can against whichever group they can - historically, fascists often target LGBTQ people first, and at the moment it’s easier to start with trans people than explicitly going after gay people - yet.
But the anti-porn laws are explicitly about targetting LGBTQ people. And they’re only part of the way down the roadmap.