Tag: porn

Southern Baptists target porn, sports betting, same-sex marriage and ‘willful childlessness’

Southern Baptists meeting this week in Dallas will be asked to approve resolutions calling for a legal ban on pornography and a reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court’s approval of same-sex marriage.

The proposed resolutions call for laws on gender, marriage and family based on what they say is the biblically stated order of divine creation. They also call for legislators to curtail sports betting and to support policies that promote childbearing.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, is also expected to debate controversies within its own house during its annual meeting Tuesday and Wednesday — such as a proposed ban on churches with women pastors. There are also calls to defund the organization’s public policy arm, whose anti-abortion stance hasn’t extended to supporting criminal charges for women having abortions.

In a denomination where support for President Donald Trump is strong, there is little on the advance agenda referencing specific actions by Trump since taking office in January in areas such as tariffs, immigration or the pending budget bill containing cuts in taxes, food aid and Medicaid.

Remnants of the epic showdown in Dallas 40 years ago

Southern Baptists will be meeting on the 40th anniversary of another Dallas annual meeting. An epic showdown took place when a record-shattering 45,000 church representatives clashed in what became a decisive blow in the takeover of the convention — and its seminaries and other agencies — by a more conservative faction that was also aligned with the growing Christian conservative movement in presidential politics.

The 1985 showdown was “the hinge convention in terms of the old and the new in the SBC,” said Albert Mohler, who became a key agent in the denomination’s rightward shift as longtime president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Attendance this week will likely be a fraction of 1985’s, but that meeting’s influence will be evident. Any debates will be among solidly conservative members.

Many of the proposed resolutions — on gambling, pornography, sex, gender and marriage — reflect long-standing positions of the convention, though they are especially pointed in their demands on the wider political world. They are proposed by the official Committee on Resolutions, whose recommendations typically get strong support.

A proposed resolution says legislators have a duty to “pass laws that reflect the truth of creation and natural law — about marriage, sex, human life, and family” and to oppose laws contradicting “what God has made plain through nature and Scripture.”

To some outside observers, such language is theocratic.

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New UN Treaty Allows for Virtual Child P*rn

A new UN treaty to combat cybercrimes would allow predators and tech giants to profit from the sexual exploitation of children, including through images created using AI.

These new threats are emerging while the United Nations launches a new treaty to address cybercrime, but the new treaty only addresses some of the threats from sexual exploitation.

While the new treaty calls for criminalizing non-consensual sharing of intimate pictures, it still allows for a broad swath of sexualized content involving children. For instance, while the treaty criminalizes what is newly called “child sexual abuse material,” this term refers narrowly to images of real children. The new term allows for child porn created through Artificial Intelligence. As is now widely known, AI images are shockingly real.

Such images, soon to be allowed by UN treaty, would still be in violation of U.S. federal law. Specifically, in several sections, the new UN treaty allows countries to de-criminalize virtual child pornography in all circumstances as well as private sexting by minors, even to adults.

The General Assembly adopted the treaty on December 24, 2024.  Now countries must sign and ratify it before it goes into force. A signing ceremony for the new treaty will take place at a Summit in July in Hanoi. The treaty will enter into force after forty countries ratify it.

Supporters of the treaty argue that legalizing sexting is compassionate because adolescents have a right to sexual expression. Some argue that letting pedophiles satisfy their sexual preferences with virtual material would make it less likely that they would prey on real children. And they say that dropping the term “child pornography” is necessary to avoid re-victimizing those who have been exploited. They call all this part of a “trauma-informed” and “harm-reduction” approach, based on new theories in behavioral therapy.

Regardless of the merits of such arguments, they would appear to conflict with the priority of law enforcement of preventing abusers from harming future victims. There is no evidence that such new approaches make law enforcement more effective. Until recently, U.S. Justice Department experts argued against it.

Moreover, there is evidence that allowing sexual predators to engage with virtual pornography leads to more child sexual abuse, not less. And anti-trafficking advocates are all too familiar with how underage girls are lured into pornography and eventually the sex industry through sexting.

A recent investigation of the Wall Street Journal uncovered how Meta chat bots pose a danger to children and how executives at the company deliberately allowed the chat bots to engage children sexually and to pose as children willing to engage in sexual acts. The investigation found that sexual predators and tech giants have a common interest in ensuring that children can be sexualized online.

Meta programmers were being pushed by the Meta executive suite not to impose excessive limits on sexual content, including involving children as users and objects, because of the high engagement it generates and the profits this would generate. As a result, existing firewalls to protect children were ineffective by design. Chat bots lured children into sexual conversations that eventually lead to progressively more explicit and degrading sexual content. And chat bots also posed as children who are willing to entertain lewd and even violent sexual behavior from their adult and child users.

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Beloved gay porn star, Colton Ford, found dead at 62 after mysterious hiking accident

A beloved gay porn star, Glenn Soukesian, better known as Colton Ford, was found dead in a mysterious hiking accident outside Palm Springs, California, authorities confirmed.

Ford, 62, was found dead Monday night on the Goat Trails in the California desert oasis, according to the Bay Area Reporter.

Police found his remains on Monday after his friends had reported him missing when he failed to return from a hike the day before.

Authorities do not yet have a cause of death, but the local coroner has ruled out foul play, a spokesperson for the Palm Springs Police Department told the Reporter.

Ford, from Pasadena, was a silver fox success story, launching his 22-year adult film career at the age of 40, according to Out magazine.

He worked with studios including MRS Releasing, RawF—kClub, All Worlds, Mustang, and Falcon Studios.

“He was a brilliant artist who always kept a song in his heart …Sweet, funny, kind, sassy – and hopelessly handsome,” Ford’s friend Tim Wood wrote on Facebook.

Ford had been a recording artist before his porn career, working with Denise Rich’s production company MIDE Productions as well as Virgin Records.

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Sen. Mike Lee’s obscenity bill is a free speech nightmare straight out of Project 2025’s playbook

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.

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Redefining Obscenity: Lawmakers Take Aim at More Online Content

Two Republican lawmakers are advancing a bill that could dramatically expand the federal government’s ability to criminalize certain content online.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Representative Mary Miller of Illinois have introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA), legislation that aims to overhaul the legal definition of obscenity and give prosecutors wide authority to target more online content.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Supporters of the bill claim it is designed to protect families and children from harmful material, but civil liberties advocates warn that its sweeping language threatens to criminalize large swaths of constitutionally protected expression.

IODA discards key elements of the Supreme Court’s long-standing Miller test, which has served as the nation’s benchmark for identifying obscene content since 1973. Under that framework, courts assess whether material appeals to prurient interest, depicts sexual conduct in a “patently offensive” way by community standards, and lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

Lee and Miller’s bill replaces that careful balancing test with a rigid federal definition. According to the proposed language, content is considered obscene if “taken as a whole, [it] appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion,” if it “depicts, describes or represents actual or simulated sexual acts with the objective intent to arouse, titillate, or gratify the sexual desires of a person,” and if it “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

Promoting the bill, Lee declared, “Obscenity isn’t protected by the First Amendment, but hazy and unenforceable legal definitions have allowed extreme pornography to saturate American society and reach countless children.” He added, “Our bill updates the legal definition of obscenity for the internet age so this content can be taken down and its peddlers prosecuted.”

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GOP Senator Introduces Bill to Make All Porn a Federal Crime, Following Project 2025 Playbook

Last year, the rightwing think-tank the Heritage Foundation launched Project 2025, which laid out much of the policy blueprint for the current Trump administration. One of the project’s espoused goals was to permanently criminalize all pornography. Now, a Republican senator with kind words for Trump has introduced a bill that would do just that.

Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) recently introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA), which would effectively criminalize all pornography nationwide by legally redefining what it means to be obscene. For years, “obscenity” has been all but a defunct legal category that narrowly defines speech that remains unprotected by the First Amendment. Lee would explode this legal category, expanding it to encompass virtually all visual representations of sex.

According to the bill text, “a picture, image, graphic image file, film, videotape, or other visual depiction” of any media that “appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion” would be considered criminal. In other words, if you have an old VHS tape of some Cinemax-style smut stashed away in your garage, you could, under this law, be considered to be harboring deeply illicit materials. Some critics have suggested that Lee’s definition of obscenity is so ridiculously broad that it could effectively criminalize Game of Thrones. That said, the punishments for merely possessing porn under the proposed law seem unclear at this point, as the legislation seems more focused on punishing the creators and distributors of racy material.

The law would “pave the way for the prosecution of obscene content disseminated across state lines or from foreign countries and open the door to federal restrictions or bans regarding online porn,” The Daily Caller writes.

“Obscenity isn’t protected by the First Amendment, but hazy and unenforceable legal definitions have allowed extreme pornography to saturate American society and reach countless children,” said Lee, in a press release about the bill. “Our bill updates the legal definition of obscenity for the internet age so this content can be taken down and its peddlers prosecuted.”

Lee’s view of pornography hews closely to that of the Heritage Foundation, which has similarly sought to crush the smut industry. In its Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025 defines pornography as the “omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children” and argues that the “people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned” and that “telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

It should be noted that porn has always been a hot-button issue and that critics have long tried to criminalize it. The history of the anti-pornography movement in the U.S. is a long and complicated one, littered with differing ideological justifications and strange bedfellows. In recent years, however, the anti-porn crusade has largely been led by the MAGA right.

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New GOP Bill Seeks To Take Sledgehammer To Online Porn Industry

Congressional Republicans will introduce legislation Thursday that would severely crack down on internet pornography and potentially deal a major blow to the online porn industry.

Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee and Republican Illinois Rep. Mary Miller’s Interstate Obscenity Definition Act would create a national definition of obscenity under the Communications Act of 1934 and amend the Supreme Court’s 1973 “Miller Test” for determining what qualifies as obscene, according to background on the bill exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The bill would pave the way for the prosecution of obscene content disseminated across state lines or from foreign countries and open the door to federal restrictions or bans regarding online porn.

“Obscenity isn’t protected by the First Amendment, but hazy and unenforceable legal definitions have allowed extreme pornography to saturate American society and reach countless children,” Lee told the DCNF. “Our bill updates the legal definition of obscenity for the internet age so this content can be taken down and its peddlers prosecuted.”

Lee and Miller have been leading advocates in Congress to take on internet pornography at the federal level and protect children from exposure to online porn.

The lawmakers’ bill would make obscenity easier to prosecute by altering the three-pronged approach known as the Miller Test from the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Miller v. California, according to the background on the bill. The Miller Test determined content to be obscene if it appeals to “prurient interests,” describes sexual conduct “in a patently obscene way” and lacks “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”

Lee and Miller are seeking to update that definition in part by changing the second prong about portraying sexual conduct “in a patently offensive way … specifically defined by the applicable state law.” Instead, their bill would determine content to be obscene if it depicts or describes “actual or simulated sexual acts with the objective intent to arouse, titillate or gratify the sexual desires of a person.”

Lee has justified the legislation in part by arguing that the Supreme Court’s “Miller Test” is no longer applicable in an era where porn is primarily viewed online and easy for children to access.

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Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too

Though porn addiction is not diagnosable, and never has been, there is a large self-help industry surrounding the concept. Mostly online (though in religious areas, such as Utah, there are numerous in-person treatment sites), this industry promotes the idea that modern access to the Internet, and the porn that thrives there, has led to an epidemic of dysregulated, out-of-control porn use, and significant life problems as a result.

Over recent years, numerous studies have begun to suggest that there is more to the story than just porn. Instead, we’ve had growing hints that the conflicts and struggles over porn use have more to do with morality and religion, rather than pornography itself. I’ve covered this surge of research in numerous posts and articles.

Now, researchers have put a nail in the coffin of porn addiction. Josh Grubbs, Samuel Perry and Joshua Wilt are some of the leading researchers on America’s struggles with porn, having published numerous studies examining the impact of porn use, belief in porn addiction, and the effect of porn on marriages. And Rory Reid is a UCLA researcher who was a leading proponent gathering information about the concept of hypersexual disorder for the DSM-5. These four researchers, all of whom have history of neutrality, if not outright support of the concepts of porn addiction, have conducted a meta-analysis of research on pornography and concluded that porn use does not predict problems with porn, but that religiosity does.

The researchers lay out their argument and theory extremely thoroughly, suggesting that Pornography Problems due to Moral Incongruence (PPMI) appear to be the driving force in many of the people who report dysregulated, uncontrollable, or problematic pornography use. Even though many people who grew up in religious, sexually conservative households have strong negative feelings about pornography, many of those same people continue to use pornography. And then they feel guilty and ashamed of their behavior, and angry at themselves and their desire to watch more.

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Canadians’ latest plan to hit America where it hurts… and block website that’ll leave millions unsatisfied

Canadians are calling for authorities in The Land of the Maple Leaf to hit Americans where it hurts most – and ban Pornhub.

The X-rated pornography site, which is Canadian-owned, gathers nearly 40 percent of its traffic from the United States, according to their last yearly review. 

As the trade war between the US and Canada continues on, those over the northern border are calling for the drastic measure. 

One of those includes Matthew Puzhitsky, who shared a now viral video to his Instagram in which he called for the site to be pulled in the US.

In his clip, Puzhitsky referred to the idea as Canada‘s secret ‘nuke’ and hilariously deemed it a ‘mic drop’ moment. 

Speaking with The New York Post, he added: ‘If Canada could ban Pornhub in the states, we win the trade war. That’s it. There is no trade war.’

Since the video was shared online, a petition calling for Canadian authorities to block Pornhub in the states was also published online. 

It has yet to gather any real steam online, receiving only 52 signatures as of Saturday morning. 

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Mike Lee’s App Store Accountability Act Would Make Google and Apple Check IDs

Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee has introduced a bill to keep porn out of app stores. There might just be one tiny problem here: They already do.

So, what’s the point? Dig a little deeper and you’ll see that this bill is about forcing age verification on app stores and mobile devices, with a side goal of chilling sex-related speech.

Lee is framing his new bill (S. 5364) as a matter of “accountability”—a word found right in the bill’s title—and of preventing “big corporations” from “victimiz[ing] kids” with “sexual and violent content.” We can’t count on tech companies to act “moral” on their own accord, Lee posted to X.

But big corporations like Google and Apple already ban apps featuring sexual content, and these bans extend not just to kids but to everybody.

While apps can be downloaded from a plethora of sources, there are two main centralized app marketplaces: Apple’s App Store, for iPhones, and the Google Play store, for Androids. Play Store guidelines reject all apps “that contain or promote sexual content or profanity, including pornography, or any content or services intended to be sexually gratifying.” The App Store explicitly prohibits apps featuring “overtly sexual or pornographic material,” which it defines broadly to include any “explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.” Apple also bans “hookup” apps and any other “apps that may include pornography or be used to facilitate prostitution.”

Lee’s bill can’t be about simply convincing Apple and Google to adopt his version of morality, since they already have.

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