By Adam Carrington
Project 2025, a proposed plan for the next Republican presidential administration, has caught a lot of flak. Democrats have lambasted it and tried to foist it upon any GOP candidate they can. Former President Donald Trump, who would be the only plausible Republican president in 2025, has repeatedly disavowed it.
On Monday, Project 2025 received another antagonist. A group of actors in “adult” films announced the launch of a $100,000 campaign against its proposed limitations on pornographic material. The effort is being styled the “hands off my porn” campaign.
Whatever its other merits or demerits, the architects of Project 2025 should wear this criticism as a badge of honor. Much more should be done, legally and culturally, to limit, suppress, and ostracize the making and consumption of pornography.
Pornography is estimated to have made nearly $175 billion in 2023 worldwide, with a massive chunk of that revenue generated in the United States. One estimate claims that $3,075.64 is spent on pornographic material every second.
What does pornography do? It degrades the people involved, regardless of why they participate or how they think about their participation. For some, they are brought in through sex trafficking or other coerced means. For others, they do so willingly. While the two situations contain one important ethical distinction, namely consent, we cannot reduce the morality or benefit of all activity to that measure. Societies never have — and for good reason.
Those involved in making pornography destroy the link between the sexual act and the rest of our humanity. Pornography severs the relational link, wherein sex expresses loving intimacy within the protective confines of stable, healthy marriages. Pornography destroys the procreative link, whereby the act remains open to the creation of the next generation of human beings. Finally, it damages our link to God, disobeying his natural (and revealed) law that orders our lives for our physical, emotional, and spiritual health.
Pornography also degrades the persons consuming it. They participate in the severed links described above that plague participants in this industry. Severing sex from relationships also affects their real-life marriages and friendships. It facilitates treating other human beings as objects to be used for one’s own selfish pleasure. This is especially true of how men view women, leading to mistreatment and abuse where protection should reign. Regardless of gender, we should be treating each other as fellow, equal human beings with whom we respectfully interact. Pornography also addicts its watchers to cheap and ugly thrills, fueling fetishes and their ilk. Instead, we should be engaging with each other through the long-term contentment of monogamy.
Along these lines, pornography consumption makes friendship harder as well, for it accentuates the sexualization of everyone and everything. This has been a long-standing trend by which we now seem culturally exhausted but unable to extricate ourselves from its malicious jaws.
According to recent reports, around half of men ages 18-49 have consumed pornography in the last month. It is a social, mental, and spiritual epidemic of high proportions. It is destroying lives and relationships and contributing to our shaky and withering social fabric.
Many will object to these observations, not by denying their intrinsic truth but by supporting the “freedom” to engage in and consume adult material. They are wrong. Morally, the only true freedom comes in a will and consequent actions ordered toward the good. Legally, we limit and outright ban people acting on their desires all the time when we see the harm it can (and does) do to themselves and to others. If we can ban certain drugs from recreational use, if we are coming alive to the harms of smartphones (pornography among them), then we should be more than open to limiting and suppressing this malicious industry.
So the architects and defenders of Project 2025 should have some pride in receiving this critique from the pornography industry. The next president, Republican or Democrat, should work with Congress to implement restrictions on the making and consuming of it. Our future would be better for it.
Adam Carrington is an assistant professor of politics at Hillsdale College.
