If we talk about banning guns and vaping, let’s also consider limits on porn

https://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/cynthia-m-allen/article238333653.html

FORT WORTH
Movement conservatives have had an interesting year.

Aside from the more predictable battles with the political left, they’ve been engaged in a far more significant debate over their own political identity: Are conservatives really just classical liberals, whose focus should remain on maximizing individual autonomy? Or is their mission to use state power to pursue the common good?

One that might seek to ban pornography, for example?

That’s the latest flash point, and perhaps the most telling yet,in the struggle at the heart of the conservative movement.

The more I read about it, the more I tend to agree with the reformers — those conservatives who want a course correction away from greater atomization and toward greater community. These “common good” conservatives, as they are sometimes called, have been criticized for not having a specific policy agenda.

Restricting pornography would be a great place to start.

Last year, while the #MeToo movement was raging, The New York Times’ Ross Douthat drew the somewhat obvious connection between the availability of porn and the not-so-shocking prevalence of sexually depraved men. “If you want better men by any standard, there is every reason to regard ubiquitous pornography as an obstacle,” he wrote.

That correlation appears to have propelled into action, at least the four Republican members of Congress who last week asked Attorney General William Barr to use existing obscenity laws to restrict pornography.

Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, Missouri Rep. Vicky Hartzler, and Texas Rep. Brian Babin wrote that “the explosion in pornography” coincides with increased violence against women, sex trafficking and child pornography. The phenomenon, they argue, is especially harmful to youths exposed to hard-core pornography at ever-younger ages.

PORN’S EFFECT ON CHILDREN

David Adams

Article URL : https://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/cynthia-m-allen/article238333653.html