A History of Gendered Censorship and the Costs of Faith-Based ‘Porn’ Panics

What happens when a small group of politicians’ faith-fueled crusade for a preferred American culture collides with free speech rights, queer rights and visibility, and secular governance? A recent rash of anti-pornography proposals, like outright bans on porn or age verification laws, provides further evidence that shows how far-right politicians are willing to turn moral panic into policy, no matter how unconstitutional and seemingly outlandish these proposals appear to be.

For example, Michigan state Rep. Josh Schriver—a Republican lawmaker characterized as racist, homophobic and a perpetrator of “abhorrent rhetoric”—went viral during September 2025 for leading fellow far-right state lawmakers in proposing a total ban on online pornography in the state’s digital space. Even some conservative audiences responded to news of the legislation with a refreshingly measured collective speculation on this bill’s overreaching free speech questions.

House Bill (HB) 4938, Schriver’s proposal, is the “Anti-Corruption of Public Morals Act,” and it proposes sweeping criminal penalties and fines for what the bill defines as “prohibited material.”

The proposed bill offers a definition of what forms of expression constitute the classification of being prohibited, and it broadly defines virtually anything that can be construed as marginally sexual in nature as pornography. The bill goes as far as promoting anti-LBGTQ+ rhetoric and the promotion of transgender erasure by criminalizing all material dealing with transgender identity.

In presenting the bill to his supporters and critics, Schriver and his co-sponsors push the rhetoric of spiritual righteousness as justification for its sweeping measures: a bill that defines the public morality and prescribes personal behavior and beliefs about anything that deals with sexuality, relationships, gender and the role these subjects play in our lives. While there is luckily no path forward for this bill because of Michigan’s current political leadership, Schriver’s spectacle is the latest example of censorship efforts made by far-right politicians to seize on growing moral panic about reproductive autonomy, sexual and gender identity and the need to expand queer equity.

Queer populations have been targeted as scapegoats for populist far-right movements. Parallels can be drawn between proposals of the Josh Schrivers of the present and the agendas and “issues” that were defining siren calls for the Nazi regime’s use of perversion laws as a pretext to incarcerate and murder LGBTQ+ people who lived in Germany at the fall of the Weimar Republic and the deadly rise of Adolf Hitler. In absolutely no capacity am I calling Schriver a Nazi. Instead, I am drawing on these eerily similar moments in human history that saw many religious, social and sexual minorities targeted by a powerful minority of people with overly disproportionate power.

‘Degenerate’ Policies

But modern examples of such efforts to rid the world of “degenerate” behavior that goes against one small group’s perception of moral decency reveal a tangled, interconnected web of faith and religion being misappropriated in the name of censorship and bigotry rebranded as moral purity.

In my tenure covering far-right extremist movements and the legal side of the adult film industry, I’ve seen an apparent acceptance among right-wing political movements to condone beliefs and viewpoints once thought of as fringe and taboo. The rise of Christian nationalism and supremacy and its mainstreaming has allowed for the rise of more open and proud religious extremists who ascended to elected office relying on bullying, ego and the activation of thousands of followers.

Another example of this conduct is in Oklahoma, where state Sen. Dusty Deevers, a far-right Republican, introduced an outright ban on pornography to the state legislature two years in a row. A pastor in his home community of Elgin, OK, Deevers uses his pulpit to interpret the Holy Bible as a justification for militant, radical Christian nationalistic ideological positions.

Deevers went viral in a capacity similar to Schriver when he introduced the pornography ban proposal as a pure statement bill in 2024. He went viral again in 2025, when he introduced a slate of proposals to restore what he says is “moral sanity” to the state of Oklahoma—including his proposal to ban pornography. The slate included proposals that prohibit gay marriage, no-fault divorce and abortion by classifying the act as felony murder. He called settled concepts like the long-established separation of church and state “blasphemous,” arguing that secular governments have no claim to authority because Jesus Christ is the one trustworthy source of state authority.

Like anyone in this country, Deevers and Schriver are free to hold their viewpoints and religious beliefs. But using historical evidence, the avowed mission to create a “Christian nation” is a misinformed and diluted interpretation of key events surrounding our nation’s founding as a land built on religious freedom. And when religious freedom is co-opted to justify blatant censorship for moral purity reasons, then we have to consider broader implications on the established secular and non-sectarian governance of the United States. Regardless of legal status or place in time, potentially “obscene” or “indecent” forms of sexual expression have always been targets of moralist agendas and organizations seeking to define a universal standard of national morality.

And the apparent obsession with sexuality among Christian nationalists and similarly aligned individuals, groups and movements is a deep-seated sentiment in anti-pornography campaigns. Most modern anti-pornography groups try to cast themselves as non-sectarian, non-religious and non-political. Entire ecosystems of information dissemination are built around these overlapping movements that share a common belief in seeing otherwise legal forms of speech and expression maligned, castigated and eventually abolished from the national culture. It is worth noting the operational functionality that also bears resemblance to social purity movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The social purity movements dealt with the supposed sexual impurity of women at the time, especially as large cities in North America and the UK experienced rapid urbanization, record migration rates to new urban centers and the Industrial Revolution.

Comstock Laws and Anti-Obscenity Legislation

Well before the commonplace nature of sex and pornography as we know it today, perversion has been associated with criminal and antisocial behavior. The modern anti-pornography movement can find its earliest influences in now-defunct organizations like the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which was founded by Anthony Comstock in 1873. This society is crucial to understanding modern anti-pornography efforts, including their organization and operation.

The group was one of the first of its kind in the United States. Chartered by the New York state legislature and granted immense power in that charter, the society served as both a de facto and de jure agent of the state in combating vice and obscene activity within the state’s boundaries. This authority permitted the society, which derived its origins from the Young Men’s Christian Association, to search, seize and aid in the arrest of individuals violating obscenity laws at the time and would be awarded half of all fines levied in resulting cases that the society supported.

The society was quite successful in winning convictions, typically going after pulp publishers and importers of material considered pornographic for the time. But Comstock and his society are best associated with the so-called Comstock laws and the practice of “Comstockery.” Not only was he the founder of the society, but Comstock was also an inspector for the U.S. Postal Service. Combining his role as a postal inspector and an anti-vice activist, he was successful in lobbying Congress to adopt the Comstock Act of 1873. Still a federal law, the Comstock Act was adopted to criminalize mailings of supposedly “obscene” materials, contraception and materials to cause abortion. In the ensuing years, 24 state legislatures adopted laws and policies known as “little Comstock laws,” which were similarly modeled after the national law for obscene mailing.

Without getting far in the weeds, there is ample evidence to indicate that the anti-pornography movements derived from these anti-vice organizations overlapped with the eugenics movement, which put forth the concept of racial purity and hygiene as a component of overall social purity.

The Comstock laws also gave a pretext for groups like the Society for the Suppression of Vice to ban books and literature they considered obscene and indecent, often arbitrarily and at the cost of artistic, literary and creative expression. Classist, racist and sexist by design, the Comstock laws were also used to censor speech and expression that the societal elites backing the society and groups like the YMCA at the time would say goes against their interpretation of public morality. Critics of the Comstock laws, especially early civil libertarians, characterized acts of gendered censorship about sex, women’s health and other material as committing the act of Comstockery.

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature, termed this critique not only as a polemical indictment of Comstock but also the actual act of censorship on material that turned out to be, in most cases, neither obscene nor indecent. Comstock laws have been enforced broadly over the decades, but have since been narrowed and are often rendered impotent for most attempts at criminal prosecution of obscenity crimes. The U.S. Supreme Court established the three-pronged obscenity test when it ruled in the case of Miller v. California in 1973. The three-pronged obscenity test is used to define whether specific material that is prurient and sexual in nature isn’t unlawful. But this remains lost upon anti-pornography campaigners. A pornographic film produced by an established adult studio is a protected form of sexual speech.

Hate Groups and Christian Supremacy Institutionalized

All of this information is crucial to understanding the origins of why and how modern moralist and anti-vice organizations exist. And, truly, anti-pornography organizations are anti-vice in the sense that they are often ideologically concentrated on propagating, directly or indirectly, the sentiment that “traditional” sexuality—between a man and woman who are married—is the one proper way to live. This sentiment gives rise to terms like “recreational sex” and further props up a very strict, toxic masculine, often white male-dominated conservative Christian worldview.

For example, the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation has advocated for ending “recreational sex.” In 2002, the late Edwin J. Feulner—Heritage Foundation’s co-founder—penned a column titled “‘Safe Sex: Time To Abstain’” that was distributed by the now-defunct Knight-Ridder Tribune wire. He was commenting on debates about blocking a Bush administration-era funding proposal to support abstinence-only sexual education in the public school system. While not uncharacteristic of conservative Christian ideology, the column that Feulner wrote is a glimpse at the revisionist approach this movement has since taken to sex and sexuality in general. Feulner states, “Programs that carry the caveat ‘if you have sex, here’s how to do it’ undermine warnings against pre-marital sex.” He denigrates safe sex and comprehensive evidence-based sexual education, still highly developed at the time, by blaming our society for the supposed goal of the leftists to expose children to “early sexual activity.” As you see here, a significant figure of the Heritage Foundation’s establishment is overlooking overwhelming and scientifically substantiated evidence that education about contraception and consent is effective.

Fast forward to 2024, and the Heritage Foundation went viral again for opposing the concept of “recreational sex” and calling for its abolition. That moment was seen on X when Heritage platformed the transgender-exclusionary and sex worker-exclusionary radical feminist and journalist Mary Harrington of right-wing publication “UnHerd.” Harrington criticized birth control pills, despite the mountains of medical and scientific evidence to support these existing pharmacological interventions for hormone balance, menses and period regulation and other key sexual health measures. Utilizing the Heritage Foundation’s social conservative platform, while coinciding with their years-long messaging on pre-marital sex, the far-right capitalized on Harrington’s messaging to further condemn recreational sex. Christopher Rufo, another public figure regarded as a far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ extremist, lifted Harrington’s messaging by calling for an end to recreational sex because it leads to single-parent families, which lead to “poverty, crime, and dysfunction.” Again, we have a figure who does not use any verifiable sources and relies only on his own beliefs. Rufo and Harrington are simply agents of old beliefs.

Additionally, Edwin Meese— the U.S. attorney general under the Reagan administration—still holds a senior role at Heritage. Meese is noteworthy because he convened the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, staffed by far-right and religious conservative thought leaders. In direct contradiction of previous reports on pornography by both Republican and Democratic administrations before President Ronald Reagan, Meese empowered individuals like Alan Sears to utilize the full force of the Department of Justice to justify unconstitutional censorship of print media that distributed pornographic material through newsstands, booksellers and convenience stores. “Playboy,” the legendary soft-core pornography magazine turned lifestyle brand, sued the office of Attorney General Meese due to the censorious actions of Sears and his staff. Sears, as the executive director of the commission’s staff, utilized commission letterhead to warn parent companies of convenience store chains to stop the sale of magazines like “Playboy” or risk being named on a national list of unfavorable companies for selling and distributing pornography. It is also well documented that Donald Wildmon, the founder of the religious conservative American Family Association, identified and compiled the list of companies Sears intimidated with letters.

Sears would then go on to lead the religious conservative legal activism organization Alliance Defending Freedom. Alliance Defending Freedom and the American Family Association are, for all intents and purposes, classified as anti-LGBTQ+ hate organizations by a variety of civil rights groups. Southern Poverty Law Center, GLAAD, PFLAG, the Human Rights Campaign, and a variety of center-left and centrist organizations affirm these characterizations and associate both groups with blatant Christian nationalism and supremacy activism. Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Family Association, and similar organizations are signatories to the Project 2025 effort, which was centrally organized by the Heritage Foundation. Key elements of Project 2025 were outlined in its policy treatise, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” which called for “pornographers” to be imprisoned for obscenity and exploitation crimes, and that all “pornography” be denied First Amendment protections and completely outlawed. Project 2025 was presented as the “plug-in-and-play” policy agenda for a conservative president’s return to the White House during the 2024 Presidential Election. Given that President Donald Trump won and is the current president, Project 2025 is being implemented in full force, including key provisions that conflate anti-pornography, anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ beliefs as a central policy goal.

Further evidence of this was confirmed by none other than Russ Vought, the current head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under President Trump. Before his new job, Vought served a tenure at the Christian nationalist Center for Renewing America. Vought and the center were central architects to Project 2025’s policy and socio-cultural positions. He was caught on hidden camera by undercover journalists attached to the Centre for Climate Reporting. While a sting to get Vought on record about his climate skepticism and anti-environmental policies, he was caught explaining that a “ban on pornography” is truly intended, but through what he told the journalists would be a “back door.” That “back door” refers to proposals like the rash of age-verification laws I’ve reported on extensively for nearly four years, phone filtering and more overt proposals, such as those prescribed by individuals like Deevers and Schriver. I again note the extent and depth of this analysis. But it goes without saying that lacking depth of common knowledge in how the modern anti-pornography and former anti-vice movements are connected is glaring. These intersections expand outward into pseudoscience, unsettled science, and the extreme misogyny movements presented as non-religiously and non-politically aligned.

Masquerading as Non-Religious ‘Abolitionists’

Focusing on the present day, moving forward, a decrease and eventual plateauing in religiosity gave way to the rise of a new class of anti-pornography organizations presenting themselves as secular. Organizations like the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), Fight the New Drug, Exodus Cry, anti-porn feminist groups like Culture Reframed and many others have risen to prominence under the guise of branding themselves as so-called “anti-trafficking” advocates. Or, in NCOSE’s case, “abolitionists” of all forms of what they consider to be sexual exploitation.

For NCOSE, the organization began as a conservative religious anti-vice organization founded by conservative clergy of the Roman Catholic Church and allies. The first iteration of NCOSE was called Operation Yorkville in 1962, and campaigned on faulty claims that individuals who are exposed to “salacious” magazines and what the group considered to be obscene were linked to rising atheism, obscenity, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency, masturbation, murder, sexually transmitted disease and other banal, unverifiable claims. The “First Amendment Law Review,” a publication of the University of North Carolina School of Law, published a study in 2010 on NCOSE’s legal history and efforts to reform the country’s obscenity laws. In that study, it is noted that the supposed ubiquity of pornography in American society at the time was a scheme by an undercover cabal of communists hoping to bring about the demise of the United States.

The researcher behind the 2010 study, University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor of journalism and media studies Stephen Bates, notes that senior leaders of the “decent literature” movement in New York state called pornography, “part and parcel of the Communist movement to destroy the United States.” This line was directly lifted from an Operation Yorkville newsletter from 1966. That belief that pornography is a product of the Communist movement coincides with sentiments that perversion, homosexuality, non-traditional sexuality and other non-Christian identities were somehow, simultaneously, obscene and “communist.” Years before Operation Yorkville, the eras of McCarthyism and post-McCarthyism featured sentiments that pornography is not only a front to Christian belief that dominated the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s, but a tool to lead Americans—particularly young people and children—toward “obscene” ideological beliefs that were characteristic of the Second Red Scare and the early years of the Cold War with the USSR.

This sentiment is consistent with an allied organization to Operation Yorkville, the Citizens for Decent Literature, which was established by the financier and Roman Catholic anti-pornography advocate Charles Keating. Keating’s group produced the propaganda film “Perversion for Profit,” which was released in 1965. “Perversion for Profit” follows the legacy of similar “exploitation” films, such as “Reefer Madness” (1936), which used disinformation and scare tactics to campaign against unfavorable cultural trends. George Putnam, a popular radio and television presenter of the era, narrated the film. In the opening minutes of the half-hour-long film, Putnam declares, “This moral decay weakens our resistance to the onslaught of the communist masters of deceit.”

Considering this context, an organization like NCOSE has a precise alignment and history that is still indicative of how it operates today. In 1968, Operation Yorkville rebranded as the Morality in Media group. As Morality in Media, the group raised its conservative profile to levels it hadn’t seen possible, especially when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the organization’s leader and founder, Jesuit priest Morton A. Hill, to serve on the administration’s so-called President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. The commission voted to recommend that all laws that govern “adult” obscenity should be decriminalized and eventually granted some degree of protected status as artistic expression under the First Amendment. As expected, Hill dissented.

As noted, the Miller test for obscenity remains the standard today for that speech protection, because the majority of prurient imagery is consensual and features the depiction of sexual acts with one or more adults aged 18 years of age or older. Morality in Media rebranded, again, to be the National Center on Sexual Exploitation in 2015. NCOSE navigated a changing audience to insinuate that porn and sexual depictions it condemns operate as an institutional exploitation system against children and women. NCOSE has also been criticized for co-opting the credibility of the federally chartered, non-profit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It is also worth noting that NCOSE’s rebranding has enabled it to catapult into the mainstream as a supposed “human rights” group.

But NCOSE has not been able to shake its conservative, anti-pornography past. The group has been linked to various hate groups that were instrumental in the drafting of Project 2025, they have been linked to efforts to campaign for the criminalization of homosexuality in African countries and they have outwardly aligned themselves with pseudoscientific figures that say pornography is addictive like heroin or crack cocaine.

Claims that pornography are addictive are associated with movements like NoFap, the alt-right, white nationalist groups that claim that pornography is an invention of the Jews, and religious groups that treat supposed “pornography addiction” through conservative religious, homophobic twelve-step recovery programs. For example, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has mental health programming that “treats” pornography as a pathological dysfunction among both men and women. There is also documented evidence of conservative evangelical denominations that are often associated with Christian nationalist and supremacy movements that use these so-called “treatments” for pornography addiction in conjunction with conversion therapies.

None of the major medical and scientific associations, including groups like the American Psychological Association or the American Public Health Association, recognize pornography as being addictive like a controlled substance. Instead, “problematic pornography use” is a compulsive behavioral dysfunction that falls entirely short of addiction classification. And conversion therapy against people with LGBTQ+ identities is considered pseudoscientific. Most people who claim pornography addiction are highly religious.

Freedom at Risk

How do we account for all of the information here? The historical throughline is very clear: the same anxieties about sexuality, gender and cultural change that animated the Comstock era, the purity crusades of the early 20th century and the “porn panics” of the Reagan era have, clearly, never gone away. They have only been repackaged and rebranded—sometimes as secular wolves in sheep’s clothing, sometimes under the banner of the “child protection” lobby and often under the guise of patriotism and Christian nationalistic family values. And the result of that is a never-ending cycle of gendered censorship that consistently undermines the freedom of speech in our country, further erases queer and transgender identities and advances exclusionary visions of morality. As you will learn, what is at stake is not just the availability of pornography, but more.

The very idea of pluralism and self-determination in a secular democracy is at risk. And when lawmakers and organizations use religion as a blunt tool to define “decency,” they weaponize faith against difference. They empower the state to police our private lives and create these hierarchies of belonging that leave women, LGBTQ+ people, sex workers and non-Christians perpetually vulnerable to the political will of authoritarian-friendly, far-right religious fanatics.

If history teaches us anything, it is that these projects of moral and social purity are always doomed to fail in their stated claims. Human sexuality is too diverse, too enduring and too integral to the human experience to be campaigned, regulated and legislated away. But the costs of these panics—censorship, stigma, surveillance and state-sanctioned discrimination and violence—are borne by real people whose freedoms and dignities are stripped in the process. If faith is supposed to inspire compassion, love and solidarity, then it can also inspire restraint. And that restraint is from imposing one group’s vision of morality on everyone else in the broad society. Anything less is not just hypocritical but an assault on fundamental human freedoms.