I heard that Project 2025 wants to ban pornography. As a producer of smut myself, I had to check it out to see if it was as mean as it sounded. You can find the text relating to porn in the document. It’s on page 37.
Here’s the quote:
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender
ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot
inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual
liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its
purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product
is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime.
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should
be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed
as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that
facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
There were a few other references to pornography, but most of it is in the early pages.
As you can see, Project 2025 weirdly associates ‘Pornography’ with transgender people.
When I think of porn, I think of opening up a nice book with blunt depictions of a career woman extracting business secrets from a competitor’s sales rep while she extracts his orgasms. Or I might think of a relaxing, sensual, sunshine-lit scene of two lesbian women in a silken sheet bed. I might also think of an eight-foot tall demon, with literal fire behind his pectoral muscles, making use of a submissive who only now understands the costs of the deal she made.
I don’t think “Transgender person exists in library book”
Do the big brains at the Heritage Foundation not know what pornography is? Someone, please help me understand!
(I suspect they probably do, and enjoy it quite a bit. How long before there’s another scandal like Falwells pool-boy cuckolding?)
Maybe these remarks are uncharitable. The entire context of this section of Project 2025 was about defending the family. Of course, the family is about gender, schools, and ‘critical race theory’. This section of Project 2025 alludes to problems of divorce, out-of-wedlock childbirths, and fatherlessness. It’s quite thin on solutions, but most of the problems they seem to think are about gender and race. There is no evidence here that the writers of Project 2025 gave empirical consideration to why divorces may happen, or why children may be born outside of a nuclear family, or why that happens so often for black children. (If you studied that last thing, you might be guilty of ‘critical race theory’ after all).
It’s almost as if the Heritage Foundation thinks the threat to families is… people who are not cishet or who support something called ‘critical race theory’. So maybe the solution for them is making trans people invisible.
This highlights the “stupid, but dangerous” nature of conservative thinking. In their document, they openly threaten ‘librarians and educators,’ which starkly reveals their deep-seated hostility towards knowledge. They lament perceived threats to their narrow definition of ‘family,’ presuming to possess a solution to what they see as societal decay. But what is their solution beyond scapegoating here?
Their focus on blaming trans people distracts from grappling with the real issues at hand—such as the complex causes of divorce, the challenges faced by single mothers, and the realities of childhood outside the nuclear family. Unable to confront these complicated problems, their scapegoating will only intensify, leading to further suffering for trans individuals.
Conservatives can only ever exacerbate the very issues they claim to want to resolve.
This, among other reasons, is why republican talk of ‘defending the family’ always sounds fascistic. There are policies that would improve the lives of nuclear families, but the republican party is not likely to support or understand them. Certainly, trans people are no threat to the nuclear family. If anything, republicans are.