Another Day, Another Silly Scold

In what is probably easy-cheap hits bait (check the number of comments on his Twitter post and his column), or a kiss-up to his wife or old biddy followers, Matt Walsh is again dealing with the pressing issues of the day by bemoaning that some people (mostly men) like to see depictions of people in revealing or no clothing and people having sex by arguing for a "ban" on "porn" at The Daily Wire.

If you had asked the average person 50 years ago whether it should be legal to distribute grotesque, hardcore pornography through a medium where people of all ages, especially kids and young teens, might have easy and free access to it, he probably would have been shocked that you even needed to ask the question.

Straight out of the gate, Walsh goes to the extremes. What does this have to do with a video featuring, for example, one man and one woman having sex being watched by a middle-aged man? And is Walsh unaware that "stag films" were a thing?

Ask the same question to the average person today and he will also be shocked that you felt the need to ask it.

Walsh laments societal change. I do, too, in some ways. Walsh is a big advocate for "marriage". If we could go back to men 50 years ago and describe what "marriage" and American women are now like, what do you think the average man would think? But I digress.

Even the standard "conservative" in today's culture thinks that any discussion of banning or censoring porn is madness. Porn has been widely available through the internet for a couple of decades, therefore it must always and forever be available.

No, it's media and banning media featuring consenting adults shouldn't be a priority.

1) Porn is prostitution. 

Prostitution is illegal in every state save one, yet pornography is legal in every state.

Is prostitution really illegal? Most modern dating and marriage is prostitution, or hardly distinguishable from it.

The effect is that a person can go to jail for accepting money in exchange for sex — unless the sex is filmed and viewed by millions of other people.

It's called performance art. There are all sorts of things that would be illegal if not part of CONSENTED TO performance art or sport. Many of the challenges on shows like Survivor would be considered torture. Boxing? Mixed martial arts? A football tackle? Skeet shooting? Racing vehicles? Surgeons cutting people open?

Hey, if I ask someone personal question in a workplace, I can get fired and sued. But if I do it as a therapist, I get paid!

If I follow someone, it is stalking. But if I'm a private investigator, I get paid.

Setting fire to an animal I encounter while hiking would be illegal. Chefs get paid to set fire to animals.

I'd be in really big trouble if I set fire to someone. Unless it was part of a cremation.

Context matters.

Prostitution is made legal by the presence of a camera.

Also, all participants getting paid. That's important.

How does that make any sense?

Prostitution shouldn't be illegal.

It seems that a reasonable and honest person must either advocate for the prohibition of prostitution in all its forms, or for the legalization of prostitution in all its forms.

Here we go again. All forms?

But perhaps those people can stop just for a moment and ask themselves whether they really want their children to live in a country with internet porn exploding from every computer and Bunny Ranches on every street corner.

Right, because that would happen. I drive my kids past a "gentlemen's club" all of the time. But I'm sure Walsh thinks those should be illegal, too.

I don't want my kids to live in a country where scolds "ban porn". The counties that officially do aren't exactly great places for women or children. Or Christians.

In what way would that improve society?

It improves society if consensual adult behavior that has gone on for all of human history and will always go on isn't empowering organized crime.

2) Porn feeds the sex trafficking industry.

Sure, if you define sex work as sex trafficking.

Sex traffickers routinely force their slaves into pornography.

And ISIS makes videos of their murders, so Walsh should never watching a movie about terrorism.

And how does the viewer of internet porn know whether a woman is "freely consenting" or not? Well, the same way he knows she's of legal age. He doesn't. He can't. He accepts that he may well be watching a drugged, abused, and coerced woman exploited for his pleasure. Her dignity, her liberty, her humanity is of no concern to him whatsoever. The porn viewer becomes morally complicit in the abuse of women.

All of this can be true of any media. Walsh has no idea if many of the products he buys were made by slave labor or not.

No wonder the Michigan State Police Department found that porn is used or imitated in over 40% of the sex crimes they investigate.

How did it end up in porn in the first place? Someone thought of it. So people do things in real life and people do some of the same things in porn.

Also, how do the police know this? Wouldn't that require watching porn? If porn rots brains, we can't trust that those people say, right?

3) Porn destroys children.

Well that's strange, because millions of people watch a lot of porn with no child whatsoever being hurt in the slightest.

An American child is first introduced to hardcore internet porn at the age of 11, on average.

Would "banning" it change that? Nope. Does Wash realize that most kids used to live in the same room as the rest of their family?

Walsh's argument here is basically that because kids might get drunk, alcohol should be banned. But Walsh likes his drinks, so he'll say that's different.

The fact is, most of those children do not suffer any serious, ongoing effects. If Walsh isn't one of those kids all grown up, his neighbor or coworkers area, even the ones he takes for very swell people.

4) Porn makes you less free.

Walsh wants to significantly reduce freedom to make us free. Or something.

This is a spiritual argument he's making, and he's free to do that. It is entirely unconvincing to people who don't share Walsh's theology.

There is nothing freeing about porn.

That's not true. For some, including some married people, it frees them up to enjoy sex more. Some therapists actually recommend explicit videos to couples who are having certain troubles.

Porn kills freedom because it enslaves the viewer to his passions.

Many men find it frees them up by helping them orgasm faster so they can move on from masturbating more quickly.

They are so consumed by pornography, so beholden to it, that they are not capable of intellectually engaging with any criticism of it.

Or maybe they see silly arguments for what they are.

They are obsessed with porn, and they will viciously defend it, yet they derive no joy from it and they hate themselves while they watch it.

Walsh may be describing his own personal past experiences, but he can't claim that this is everyone who disagrees with his current silly arguments.

They are slaves. And slaves cannot be free.

So Walsh is either NOT a slave to Christ or he isn't free.

5) Laws matter. 

The law is a teacher.

It can be. Alcohol consumption apparently didn't return to pre-Prohibition levels-per-capita until the 1970s. However, not everything that's harmful or immoral should be illegal. There are people who wouldn't watch "porn" if it was illegal. But at what cost? Enforcement would require resources better spent on other things, and reduce freedom significantly. What is Walsh actually proposition here? If a married couple takes video of themselves, he wants it illegal for them to share that video with friends or to even sell it to friends?

People are more likely to accept something as normal and moral if the law treats it as such.

Walsh oversteps there. Making something illegal discourages it. Not criminalizing it doesn't encourage it. For example, who says that eating mud is normal and moral because it isn't illegal?

That is, legislate according to the moral doctrine that created this country and served as the basis for all of its founding documents.

Agreed. One of he biggest "shoulds" was that government should be limited.

Porn is such an extreme and insidious assault on Natural Law that a country built upon Natural Law must prohibit it.

How is it an assault on Natural Law? People having sex is natural. People seeing other people having sex is also natural. Exchanging goods (or its proxy, money) for services (like sexual performance), based on human history, is natural.

Now, for the sake of efficiency, let me include a brief rebuttal to the four points that will be made against my position.

Oh, good.

1) Porn is protected by the First Amendment. 

No, it's not. Miller v. California found that obscenity is not protected speech and can be censored. Here's an interesting fact: Federal law already prohibits the distribution of obscene material. But the law is not applied or enforced as it should be.

SCOTUS has indicated that what's "obscene" is up to local communities. That goes back to when people got their porn in local shops. What Walsh finds obscene might be accepted in some places in this country. If scolds really want to take the issue back to the Court due to technological advancements that now allow anyone with a network connection to view any material that's online, I highly doubt the Court will rule to ban "porn".

Porn is morally debased filth with no redeeming quality and there is no positive application for it.

Many credentialed and experienced experts disagree. So good luck with that.

3) Porn prohibition is unenforceable. 

No, it's not. It would be no trouble to shut down the "professional" porn operations and go after the major porn sites like Porn Hub. As for the rest of it, the government could have as much success policing it as they have in policing child porn.

This sounds good until you realize that 1) child porn means it wasn't consenting adults, and 2) people are far more likely to report child porn than adult media. Far more people want to see adult media than child abuse.

Above, Walsh called porn filmed prostitution. Well how effective have prostitution bans been?

4) It's a slippery slope.

What are you worried we might "slip" into? Decency? Lord, if only.

Walsh really doesn't see how easy it would be for Leftists to get his media banned? Far more people find Walsh's opinions on homosexuality disturbing than find "mainstream" porn offensive.

What exactly is the worst case scenario here?

More underground/black market activity, more power to organized crime, producers abandoning age restrictions and other standards since it's all illegal anyway, more distrust of government/law enforcement, high unemployment, great works of art getting banned...

If the law was really stretched to its limits, the "worst" thing I can see happening is the censorship of sexually explicit material on TV and maybe the criminalization of strip clubs. All the better, as far as I can tell.

Well there you go. Just like I thought.

You know, a cynic might note that Good Catholic Husband Walsh is locked into a marriage and so he doesn't want anyone else to have any fun, either.

We've seen where the slippery slope leads when obscenity laws are not enforced. I feel quite certain that the slippery slope in the other direction could not possibly result in anything half as bad as our current situation.

What's so bad? That people can access things they want to see? OH NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Part of the problem is that Walsh never defines porn. If we broadly define it as "sex on video" then we have to ask what constitutes sex. Is passionate, open-mouthed kissing by actors in skimpy swimsuits "porn"? What about nudity? Is the nudity in "Schindler's List" porn? Who decides? What's the objective criteria?

Having said all of this, I am not declaring that porn is a generally good thing. But we need to have priorities and pick our battles. The panicked hysteria over "porn" is probably doing more harm than any media featuring adults engaged in sex acts. We can't pretend that a middle-aged man who will never get married (again) occasionally watching media depicting consenting adults having nonviolent sex is anything like a minor compulsively viewing violent material featuring adults abusing minors.

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