A Republican legislator in Oklahoma is proposing a kind of solution to the widespread pornography contributing to the moral rot of our society.
As reported by the New York Post, pastor-turned-state Sen. Dusty Deevers is working on a bill he wants to introduce to the state legislature next month.
This bill would not only ban pornography and sexting altogether for unmarried folks, but also proposes fines up to $2,000 for consuming pornography and fines up to $10,000 for anyone producing or promoting smutty material.
The bill defines porn as any sexually explicit media that “lacks serious literary, artistic, educational, political, or scientific purposes or value,” and further defines “obscene material” as depicting any kind of sexual intercourse that is “normal or perverted, actual or simulated.”
While Deevers doesn’t necessarily have the most legislative sway, representing the tiny towns of Comanche and Elgin (which boast barely more than 5,000 people combined), the mere existence of this proposal is encouraging.
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For one, Deevers doesn’t make the same mistake as Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart in 1964, who, when asked to explain what made a certain film hard-core pornography during the famous Jacobellis vs Ohio case, had no better definition than “I know it when I see it.”
Instead, Deevers is sure to define clearly what falls under the definition of pornography, including sodomy, masturbation and other sexual perversions like sadomasochism.
He’s also careful to delineate what exhibition of certain body parts falls under the proposal’s definition of “lewd exhibition.”
For another, Deevers is careful to explain that married couples are exempt from the ban under certain conditions, and he also makes a distinction for artistic nudity, such as the kind seen in classical paintings.
Do you support this move?
While some aspects of his proposal might be hard to enforce — for instance, the possible complete ban of social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that could come with the implementation of this ban — overall, the bill is perfectly clear regarding the punishments awaiting pornographers.
Besides, considering the damage wrought by almost wholly unregulated pornography in our country, would a $2,000, or even $10,000 fine really be a disproportionate punishment?
The hard truth is that pornography has been a plague on our nation for years now.
What began as something hidden in magazines like Playboy that adults paid for and then hid under their beds in shame, has become a global, multibillion-dollar industry, with the most notorious of the porn sites, PornHub, being the sixth most viewed website in the United States in 2023.
PornHub and similar websites have come under fire for facilitating human trafficking and refusing to comply with new laws to prevent children from viewing their content, staffers film gay porn in an actual Senate Chamber, and the statistics for young people suffering from porn addiction rivals certain class A drugs.
Regardless of whether or not Deevers’ measure succeeds, we should still applaud him for having the guts to introduce such a counter-cultural bill at all — not to mention, his wisdom in diagnosing one of the central ills of our society in a clear and methodical way.
Porn is evil and has made society weaker. It dehumanizes the consumer as much as the people put on display.
And it’s time that someone sees that and proposes concrete measures to do something about it. The proposal of the pastor-turned-state senator representing two tiny towns in Oklahoma has taken the first step.
