"Protecting" children
Why are some politicians and organizations obsessed with rooting out so-called “sexual content”?
This writing and research are possible because of paid subscribers. Please consider a subscription or donation.
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.
-Kevin Roberts, introduction to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, page 5
How this can happen in Hungary is beyond comprehension. Such things have no place in Hungary – especially not in our schools… It is our job as adults to protect children, and this is true not only for us as parents: it is also true for teachers, school principals and heads of local education authorities. Such disgraceful cases show that this whole issue of gender, of gender propaganda, should not be taken lightly and should not be treated as a joke.
-Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Address to Hungarian Parliament, Feburary 27, 2023
Why the obsession with “pornography”?
Pennsylvania Senator Dave Argall recently made headlines when he asked a sixth grader at a civics bee if it was “appropriate to give pornographic magazines to kindergarteners,” then proceeded to explain to the confused child what pornography was in front of an apparently shocked audience. According to a statement from the student’s parents, there were even younger children, including their other daughter, who is in fourth grade, in attendance.
The child’s parents responded to Argall’s question by saying, in a statement on social media,
We currently live in a country where our federal government and local school boards are actively removing classic texts like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Diary of Anne Frank”. Free speech is at stake. Truth is at stake. This is the issue, not pornography. His question was a red herring, and it degraded the higher purpose of this worthy event.
Argall has since apologized for using a line of questioning with a child that was “not age-appropriate” at an event for all ages.
The senator has sponsored legislation in the past aimed at prohibiting sexually explicit materials (which, under federal law and many state laws, are already illegal to “transfer” to minors) in schools.
The ramp-up to the present moment
For many attendees of school board meetings over the past several years, the irony of Argall making comments that were “not age-appropriate” while evidently trying to make a point in support of censoring school content (the student’s presentation was about the dangers of book bans) likely feels all-too-familiar.
Opponents of so-called “inappropriate” or “pornographic” texts in schools (which are often also books with LGBTQ+ themes, or books which deal with systemic racism, and which usually target female authors of color) are often the ones reading out graphic scenes and language— sometimes in front of small children— as they accuse adults who work in schools of being the ones to introduce such language.
In South Carolina, for example, the Department of Education has published online lists— easily accessible to students during the school day— containing profanity and sexually graphic passages from books which are otherwise inaccessible to students. In their zeal for banning books, the book-banners may the ones providing the easiest access to the most objectionable material, while forbidding students from reading the context around that material.
A history of dangerous word games
It isn’t new for government officials or political aspirants to use abstract labels with unseemly connotations to shout down speech they don’t like. Using simplistic and emotionally loaded catchall phrases to describe political targets is a type of ad hominem attack, short-circuiting the chance for a rational discussion of the pros and cons of an ideas in favor of a manipulative binary. It suggests that it is not just a difference of opinion to support certain policies or ideas, but a malign or antisocial toxic behavior.
For example, both the pre-revolutionary Tsarist regimes and post-revolutionary Bolshevik regime in Russia and the USSR widely censored materials they found dangerous or “decadent”. Since the 1990s, leaders like Vladimir Putin have begun to reinstitute government censorship and media control, often explicitly targeting LGBTQ+ groups. In 2013, Russia adopted a law restricting LGBTQ+ speech in the name of protecting “minors”; in 2022 Putin signed a new version that expanded those restrictions to adults.
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis burned books and banned what they termed “degenerate” art, claiming that “modern art conspired to weaken German society with ‘cultural Bolshevism’”.
(This is an accusation former South Carolina Freedom Caucus Chair Adam Morgan echoed— hopefully unintentionally— when he visited my class a few years ago and warned my students about “cultural Marxism”. Morgan’s successor, Representative Jordan Pace, made very similar claims when he claimed on the House floor that state librarians were somehow connected to historical “German socialists”. The Southern Poverty Law Center and other extremism watchdogs have labeled “Cultural Marxism” as an antisemitic conspiracy theory.)
Opening the door to state censorship
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,
The Nazis used both propaganda and censorship to control what students read in school. Nazi censors removed some textbooks from classrooms. New textbooks taught students to obey the Nazi Party, love Hitler, and hate Jews.
In addition to Jewish people, members of German socialist parties, and other minority groups, Nazis notably targeted LGBTQ+ populations in their censorship, as when they burned the entire library of the Institute for Sexual Science (ISS) in Berlin.
As JSTOR Daily contributing editor Liz Tracey writes,
[ISS founder and pioneering LGBTQ+ advocate Magnus] Hirschfeld’s work, coupled with his support of birth control, German abortion law reform, and feminism in general, made him an enemy of the Nazi platforms of traditional gender roles, compulsory motherhood, and the elimination of the Jewish people from Europe. Antisemitism and anti-LGBTQ+ oppression, whether from the state or “unsanctioned” extremists, were inextricably linked in Hitler’s Germany. The support of autonomy for women, or equality for “sexual minorities,” was labeled as “Jewish” or “cultural Marxism” (which was and still can act as a synonym for “Jewish”). Hirschfeld was caricatured in the virulent propaganda magazine Der Stürmer and included in an anti-Jewish poster as an example of opposition supporters.
Contemporary regimes, like that of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, use state censorship (in the name of “traditional values”) to not only discriminate against and erase LGBTQ+ people and narratives, but as a wider strategy of obfuscating the government’s actions and pushing for “traditional” values in a way that solidifies right-wing authoritarian control.
Orbán and his political party took power fifteen years ago and focused on successfully taking over the media ecosystem in Hungary.
Last week, the Hungarian parliament banned public LGBTQ+ events through a constitutional amendment. They had set the stage for this amendment by first banning, in 2021, the sharing of LGBTQ+ material with minors (in the name, of course, of “protecting children”).
In an excellent recent piece, Paul Bowers warns about “rehearsals” for authoritarianism or fascism in America; Hungary and Russia’s gradual expansion of restrictions against LGBTQ+ citizens, in their mirroring of earlier fascist movements, should make us all take the potential of school and library book bans as “rehearsals” for greater government censorship and book bans very seriously.
The current US regime seems to build intentionally on the model of countries like Hungary.
Moves like those in Hungary seem like an obvious next step for culture warriors in the US, who have been conflating a broad set of policies that may or may not include legitimately objectionable components into largely meaningless umbrella terms— “woke,” “CRT,” “DEI,” “Leftist,” “Marxist”.
Florida officials even reportedly took direct inspiration from Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ+ and pro-censorship moves in writing the state’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” law.
In a recent blog post, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified shuttering government agencies devoted to human rights— while also implicitly defending Orbán’s regime— by writing,
The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor became a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against “anti-woke” leaders in nations such as Poland, Hungary, and Brazil, and to transform their hatred of Israel into concrete policies such as arms embargoes.
This statement strings together common culture war punching bags, along with what seems— because in the same breath he seems to be defending Orbán, who has been accused of using anti-Semitic tropes and propaganda— like a faux concern for the safety of Jewish people throughout the world. Rubio seeks to justify a sweeping policy change without really explaining what he’s doing, or why.
What the change itself means, according to the New York Times, deserves more reflection:
The most dramatic change is the elimination of the office of the under secretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights, which is charged with advancing American values around the world. Trump administration officials call the office a hotbed of liberal activism.
Some elements of that office, including a bureau for democracy and human rights and one for refugees, would be cut and folded into an office for foreign assistance and humanitarian aid, according to the reorganization chart posted on the State Department website. A counternarcotics bureau would also be cut and moved under an international security office.
What does this have to do with “pornography”?
As anti-“CRT” architect Chris Rufo famously wrote, in reference to his war on “Critical Race Theory,”
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think "critical race theory." We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
The same “decodifying” and “recodifying”— which sounds, in layman’s terms like a fancy name for deliberately manipulating words until they become meaningless— works with “inappropriate content” or “pornography,” as well. Instead of arguing for why a text is helpful or not helpful to an educational mission, opponents of, say Dear Martin or Flamer, can label them as “inappropriate” or “pornographic” and draw on a host of negative associations.
And the inspiration Rufo and others have taken from Hungary’s antidemocratic moves (which closely mirror those of Russia) seems obvious.
Rufo wrote on his personal blog in 2023,
But the Orbán government’s most significant policy gambit, which is little understood outside Hungary, was to reshape the institutions in both public and private life to create an enduring conservative counter-hegemony. This agenda includes far-reaching reforms in schools, universities, nonprofits, media, and government. The goal is to strengthen Hungary’s cultural foundations—family life, Christian faith, and historical memory—and to create a conservative elite capable of maintaining them.
In his book How Fascism Works, Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley writes,
When Viktor Orban assumed power, he condemned the schools as sites for liberal indoctrination. He nationalized the school system, which was previously under local school board control, and introduced a professional organization that all teachers had to join, which bound them to serve “in the interests of the nation”. A new national curriculum recommended the work of anti-Semitic Hungarian writers. Schools were told to encourage activities evocative of a glorious mythic Hungarian national past.
As America becomes more and more comfortable with authoritarian rhetoric and authoritarian policies, we’re collectively allowing people and groups— both those seeking power in bad faith and those who have really come to believe that “pornography” in school libraries is both a pressing issue and a source of harm to children pressing enough to prioritize it in public policy— to repress foundational freedoms in the name of facing down largely imaginary bogeymen.
During South Carolina’s April State Board of Education meeting, there was a general feeling during the Board’s discussion that what some members had seen as a real threat to children wasn’t turning out to be the issue they thought.
Board member Richard Harrington, voice wavering with evident emotion, echoed a major talking point of the pro-book ban contingent, saying,
It was a concern that we had, these books could be used an in-house, readily available tool for anybody that wanted to indoctrinate or manipulate a child, whether it was an older student, or whether it was a librarian, or whether it was some other person in the school… Dr. O’Shields found out that kind of thing isn’t going on, I don’t think it’s going on in his school district, but in several school districts around the United States— maybe not even that much in South Carolina. I just don’t know. But that was in my forethought about what our obligation was to try and protect these children.
Certainly, the arguments of many book-banners (and among ideologically-motivated and well-funded political organizations like Moms for Liberty) with “pornography” fit all-too-neatly into this pattern, and encourage evidently sincere people like Mr. Harrington to believe there is a Pizzagate-like conspiracy afoot against children. (Like Senator Argall, they often seem to substitute rhetorical questions for any evidence that the conspiracy is real, or that it is having real impacts in real schools.)
Melanie Shull, a leader with the Moms-for-Liberty adjacent PACE for Lex 2 organization had certainly furthered this kind of fearmongering earlier in the meeting when she used her time during public comment to create a conspiracy-theory-like web of connections between “DEI” funding and advocates against book banning.
Big Brother
There is thick irony in the fact that the best-known Western satire of the kind of government censorship contemporary anti-intellectual freedom groups employ (most specifically under the Nazi and Stalinist regimes), 1984, has itself both been frequently challenged in recent local purges, and held up by ideologues as a support for prohibiting the “indoctrination” of children (by banning books and ideas).
While it’s frequently cited in sweeping terms, the book can most explicitly be read as a warning about government manipulation of words and ideas to distort citizens’ perception of foundational reality. The book’s protagonist, Winston Smith, spends his days in the Ministry of Truth changing news articles to suit the changing state-sanctioned reality, and burning out-of-favor documents in the “memory hole”. The totalitarian government is in the process of transitioning away from English into Newspeak, a language designed to eradicate words and phrases that would allow people to discuss or even consider undesirable concepts.
When South Carolina’s Instructional Materials Review Committee selected 1984 as part of their first set of challenged books under a new state regulation, an unnamed staff member was evidently given the very Winston Smith-like role of eliminating books committee Chair Christian Hanley (who enjoys support from Moms for Liberty) had identified in advance as “inappropriate,” while retaining “classics” like 1984.
That the staff member was providing post-hoc rationales for preordained book bans is pretty clear: 1984 and the other “classics” came with formal recommendations to be retained which contained not a single quotation from the books; the non-classics came with pages of “descriptions of sexual conduct” identical to those found on the now-defunct Moms for Liberty BookLooks website.
A review of its content shows that 1984 does seem to contain the same level of, or even more graphic examples of, “descriptions of sexual conduct,” as many of the removed books.
The dangers of word games and censorship
Perhaps the committee contorted itself to retain 1984 because of the likelihood that banning it would outrage people across the political spectrum and draw renewed attention to the book’s most powerful warning: that if we allow governments unchecked discretion over what constitutes allowable speech, we allow them to remake our understanding of the world.
As historian Timothy Snyder recently wrote, “Terrorism is a real risk in the real world. The constant use of the word to denote unreal threats creates unreality. And unreality inside key institutions degrades capability.”
The same is true about concepts like “pornography” in schools, and suggestions that they lead, as Harrington suggested, to sexual grooming.
Sexual assault and exploitation of children are real and widespread problems. By calling librarians or teachers “groomers” for providing book options, by calling anything they find inappropriate for children “pornography,” and by engaging in viewpoint discrimination in the name of “protecting children” the censors of today’s authoritarian-leaning political movements and organizations make it harder to identify, understand, or address real problems.
As the SC Board of Education showed in its somewhat self-contradictory arguments for retaining 1984, not all sexual content— even content required or provided in schools— is “pornography”.
But by banning books which, at least in the case of those challenged in SC, disproportionately contain discussion of or references to sexual assault in the name of banning “pornography,” the SC Board, like other government entities, is conflating rape and sexual exploitation with sex, in general.
And, in 1984, Orwell explicitly comments on the toxic power of a government harnessing control over sexuality in this way:
Unlike Winston, she [Julia] had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship.
While I don’t know that government censors or pro-censorship groups like Moms for Liberty explicitly want to channel repressed sexuality into “war-fever and leader-worship,” I do think they’ve grasped the power of eliciting false connections between “Wokeness” and “pornography,” between “patriotism” and repression of social activism, between “religious freedom” and the silencing of beliefs that conflict with those of dominant American religious sects, between “protecting” children and subjecting them to text selection that replaces consideration of conflicting perspectives with state-approved propaganda.
And as they make it harder to actually protect children, they also open the door and wider and wider for state-sanctioned “realities” to replace actual reality in our consciousnesses.
Thank you for reading. To support this work, please consider a donation or paid subscription.
Further reading…
