A new bill in Congress threatens to dictate what Americans can read, watch and say online. On May 8, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah and Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., introduced the “Interstate Obscenity Definition Act” (IODA) — a recycled attempt to ban online pornography nationwide.
While concerns about pornography, including moral and religious ones, are part of any healthy public debate, this bill does something far more dangerous: It empowers the federal government to police speech based on subjective values. When lawmakers try to enforce the beliefs of some Americans at the expense of others’ rights, they cross a constitutional line — and put the First Amendment at risk.
The legislation aims to rewrite the legal definition of obscenity, an area of law that represents a very narrow exception to First Amendment protections.
The IODA seeks to sidestep the Supreme Court’s long-standing three-part test for obscenity, established in the 1973 case Miller v. California. The material must appeal to a prurient interest, depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
Lee’s bill would scrap that standard and replace it with a broader, far more subjective definition. It would label content obscene if it simply focuses on nudity, sex or excretion in a way that is intended to arouse and if it lacks “serious value.”
By discarding the concept of community standards, the IODA removes a key safeguard that allows local norms to shape what counts as obscenity. Without it, the federal government could impose a single national standard that fails to account for regional differences, cultural context or evolving social values.
The bill also deletes the requirement that material be “patently offensive,” a crucial element that keeps the obscenity test anchored in societal consensus. Instead, it replaces it with a subjective inquiry into whether the work was intended to arouse or titillate. But intent is notoriously difficult to prove and easy to allege. That language could easily sweep in a wide range of protected expression, including art, health information and sex education.
Hellbound and Down 