Please get past the intro of facts, and listen to the abuse of the Palestinians, especially the thousands of children over the years. For those who have argued with me in the past (I doubt you read my blogs now) listen to how they treat the child in pretrial prison and how the trial is conducted. Children, yes children are terrified, hurt by being beaten, raped, sexually abused, have been shot, arrested at night in their homes and kept with blind folds and in the dark, they are not given lawyers until the day of court by which time they have been forced to sign fake confessions or plea bargain do to pain or fear. Damn it I was an abused kid, I know the paralyzing fear of hearing the heavy footsteps coming toward you, the mind numbing cascade of desperation of not knowing what they were going to do to me next or would they walk past me. They are tried by the military and have no civil rights! My dogs that love gravy if another country did that to ten of our kids we would go to war with them … OH wait that was what Hamas tried to do with no chance of wining. Listen to this and understand that Israel and their military have been provoking these attacks and lying to the world about it. Please listen to the abuse of these children, these people who have no way to prevent their treatment. Hugs. Scottie
You will have heard this claim said over and over and over again. Here’s why it’s monstrously false.
Again she out did herself. She talks about the tRump being a cult leader with a new song as a chosen one while she lists off his horrible choices. Definitely a to watch video.
Side note not related to the video, my steroids injects kicked in, after a great night of sleep the first two nights with limited pain, I spent last night unable to even think of sleep. Finally my spouse helped me with some relief but I only got about 3.5 hours.
This morning when I got up I went right to my blog. I had to eat I was starved so I had a leftover grilled hot dog and grilled hamburger from the night before. Ron had planned on making a beef stew today which he is working on and smells grand. But I was so crazed with hunger a bit ago at 2:30 PM (I got up at 5 am and ate at 5:30 am) that I begged him to help me, so he made me a large salad, which I love and crave salads, we don’t know why. I do have an issue with anemia they once said was to my large bones not making enough red blood cells, but I have not been to low in a while. So he made this large salad and as soon as I started to eat it my cravings stopped and I could think again. I returned to being human. I was denied food as a child and even was hospitalized for malnutrition, so when I get that hungry I get frantic and desperate. I just hope now after a wonderful salad I will be able to eat his grand stew. Now to the video. Hugs. Scottie
I recommend going to the linked article. It has a lot of information on the lawsuit and how petulant the two men are. Here are some quotes. Much more at the Salon link. Hugs. Scottie
Even though the plaintiffs suing for the right to flunk female students for abortion include boilerplate arguments in which they feign concern that abortion is “killing,” the legal filing makes it clear that what really outrages Bonevac and Hatfield is that Title IX prevents them from controlling the private lives of students. Along with their anger about abortion, they grouse about not being allowed to punish students “for being homosexual or transgender.” They also argue they should be able to penalize teaching assistants for “cross-dressing,” by which they appear to mean allowing trans women to wear skirts.
As Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day wrote, the language of the legal complaint is “downright petulant.” The picture painted is of two men obsessed with controlling student lives based on what they’re packing inside their underwear. It should be common sense that college students should be graded on their performance in class, not whether or not their professor resents their sex life or sexual identity. Alas, because the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Texas banned abortion, it’s created a pretext for every busybody who wants to spend less time grading papers and more time working himself into an angry froth over the imagined sexual exploits of his students.
Even though Bonevac and Hatfield work in Austin, Texas, they filed their lawsuit 486 miles away in Amarillo, Texas. The reason for this is not mysterious: Donald Trump-appointed judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. The right-wing judge has a long and frankly unhinged history of screeching at top volume about the evils of “sexual revolutionaries.” (Yes, that does sound like a compliment, but he doesn’t mean it as such.) It takes very little to draw Kacsmaryk’s sexualized condemnation. Premarital sex, for instance, makes one a “sexual revolutionary.” Using contraception within marriage also makes one an irredeemable pervert. In his legal writings, Kacsmaryk is very clear that sex is only for procreation within marriage, and anything outside of that should draw legal sanction. He has not weighed in on whether there should be restrictions on what sexual positions are legally permissible within the procreation-only marital sex, but give him time.
“Pregnancy is not a disease, and elective abortions are not ‘health care,’” University of Texas at Austin professor Daniel Bonevac sneers in a federal court filing with professor John Hatfield. Instead, Bonevac writes, because pregnancy is the result of “voluntary and consensual sexual intercourse,” students should not be allowed time off to get abortions.
If the students disobey and miss class for abortion care, the filing continues, the professors should be allowed to flunk students.
Even though Bonevac and Hatfield work in Austin, Texas, they filed their lawsuit 486 miles away in Amarillo, Texas. The reason for this is not mysterious: Donald Trump-appointed judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. The right-wing judge has a long and frankly unhinged history of screeching at top volume about the evils of “sexual revolutionaries.”
Bonevac [screenshot above] can be seen in the October 2016 video below expressing his devotion to Trump.
Judge Kacsmaryk, a former lawyer for an anti-LGBTQ hate group, was exposed last year for failing to disclose millions in stock holdings.
Kacsmaryk was previously exposed for failing to disclose virulently anti-LGBTQ interviews and acting to hide his authorship of an anti-abortion article ahead of his Senate confirmation hearing.
More recently, he upheld a ban on drag shows at a Texas university. Kacsmaryk’s ruling to ban abortion pills is pending before the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on the issue in March.
Two male Texas professors are suing to flunk students who get abortions.
Their reason? The students had "consensual sexual intercourse."
Remember folks, if you find out during a wanted, planned pregnancy that the fetus is dead and CHOOSE to terminate, that’s an “elective abortion.” These people are as ignorant as they are cruel.
Whenever marriage equality comes up, they all scream about how gay marriage means the end of the human race bc children. So now they want to make it impossible to get an abortion, which means more people will be using contraception. Then they want to eliminate contraception to increase births, many of which will be unwanted. But that’s the best I can figure their plan is.
I want to thank Ali for the link to this story. I will try to post the comment she left pointing me to it. I do not mind a link here or there in the comments if it leads me to new good article on issues. Ali has offered me many links in the comments and all of them so far have been worth reading, and yes many I end up posting like this one. Thank you Ali. Hugs Scottie Below is Ali’s comment.
All is well. So many things tend to work out for the very best.
Here’s a new link. I’ve been reading Oliver Willis for years, and I really like his work. You’ve probably seen his work around. I now subscribe (for free) to his work on Substack, and here is the one he posted today. Bonus on each post is a photo of his doggy Kal-El, who looks like our Chrissy back when she was that age (she crossed the bridge in 2020 at age 21.) Anyway, back to the link: https://www.oliverexplains.com/p/how-boring-lgbtq-people-made-america . Enjoy when you get to it!
When I was a kid and well up until into my teens in the 1990s, the right wing in America sold us a dystopian vision of what would occur if gay and lesbian people were granted equal rights, most notably, the right to marry.
According to conservative pundits and politicians, if we allowed same-sex marriage to occur, every street in America would immediately, overnight, turn into the most extreme version of a San Francisco leather parade. Innocent families would be forced, Clockwork Orange style, to watch as bulging crotches were shoved into their faces, sparkling zippers twirling before them, women dressed in men’s clothes, men wearing dresses, the kinkiest sexual acts occurring in public at the drop of a hat.
On Fox News, the propaganda arm of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, equal marriage rights would surely end up in people marrying ducks, cows, goats, etc. Certainly.
But in the decades since then, after figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both now thankfully six feet under) blamed LGBTQ people for events like 9/11, none of that happened. For sure, there are sometimes leather parades, but they’re mostly happening in the same places where there have always been leather parades and nobody there is bothered by them.
Instead, after the epochal event of same sex marriage becoming legal, nothing happened. Nothing at all. No forced Pride parades breaking out in rural Alabama. No kids in Montana getting instructed on the fine art of same-sex kissing. No families in Orange County, California, compelled to learn the words to “YMCA” in gender reeducation camps. Nothing at all.
Why? Because the vast majority of LGBTQ people are just as boring as straight people. They have jobs, go to school and work, take care of their kids, have marital bliss and squabbles and all the rest of it. They aren’t activists militantly marching in the streets for issues or disco, but simply want to make it through another day in peace. Boring as hell, like all of us are.
And this is a triumph. Because for all of American history, the people in power – almost always wealthy, straight, white, men – have attained power and retained power by demonizing everyone else who doesn’t look like them. Black men were after their daughters, Muslim people are terrorists, women are emotional hysterics, and on and on and on. These people profit off of the dehumanization of others and by working overtime to scare people about the horror that could happen if we treated everybody with equality and respect.
Yet every time that the country gets over itself and fulfills the words of the Founders in ways that they could not comprehend in their limited view of the world and who truly deserved “liberty,” we collectively discover that the nightmare was always total nonsense.
This is a lesson to keep in mind as we watch in horror as the right whips up fears about immigrants, transgender people, and refugees from the Middle East in our current electoral cycle. Integrating LGBTQ families into the mainstream of American life made the country stronger, not weaker. Our collective understanding increased, the rich tapestry that is the United States benefitted from increased diversity. The only ones who lost out were close-minded bigots who can’t accept that the world doesn’t look like the deranged fantasies in their brains (and never existed in reality).
Boring is good. We’re all boring. Reject the lurid fantasy world of the haters and instead embrace the mundane reality of a diverse world. And throw a leather parade, if you feel like it. This is America, where you’re free to do so if you like.
If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking here to join. I won’t be putting any of my regular columns behind a paywall and they will always be free. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far!
Ali sent me this link on March 1st. Told you I have a lot of very old tabs just hang on because I want so badly to read them plus all the new ones I can’t keep up with. Thank you Ali. Hugs. Scottie
The first documented sex between two male humpback whales is just the latest challenge to our presumptions about sexuality
The sighting near Hawaii in 2022 of a male humpback whale penetrating another male has been confirmed in a new study.
Photograph: Lyle Krannichfeld and Brandi Romano/SWNS
A humpback whale’s penis entering another male. Same-sex behaviour has often been observed in cetaceans.
Photograph: Lyle Krannichfeld and Brandi Romano/Marine Mammal Science
Whales are extraordinarily sensuous creatures. Those blubbery bodies are highly sensitive, and sensitised. At social meetings, pods of sperm, humpback and right whales will roll around one another’s bodies for hours at a time. I’ve seen a group of right whales engaged in foreplay and penetration lasting an entire morning
I have also watched a male-female couple so blissfully conjoined that they appeared unbothered by our little fishing boat as they passed underneath it. And in what may sound like a career of cetacean voyeurism, I have also been caught up in a fast-moving superpod of dusky dolphins continually penetrating each other at speed, regardless of the gender of their partner.
That’s why this week’s report of the first scientifically documented male-to-male sexual interactions between two humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii is not surprising.
The remarkable image of a two-metre whale penis entering another male “leaves little room for discussion that there is a sexual component to such behaviour”, as one whale scientist, Jeroen Hoekendijk at the Wageningen Marine Research institute in the Netherlands, notes drily.
In fact, one of the whales was ailing and there has been speculation that the encounter may not have been consensual or that the healthy whale was actually giving comfort to the other. Whatever the truth, such “flagrant” acts also expose many of our human presumptions about sexuality, gender and identity.
Off the north-west Pacific coast of the US, male orcas often leave family pods to rub their erections against each other’s bellies. But females have also reportedly been seen engaging in sexual contact with one another, too.
Indeed, the graphic accounts of male-to-male behaviour may mask many “unseen” female-to-female sexual interactions.
Dr Conor Ryan, an honorary research fellow at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, notes: “It’s easy to visibly identify male ‘homosexual’ sex when an extruded penis can be two metres long.” It is less easy to diagnose when female sperm whales are seen “cuddling”, as Hoekendijk observes.
A humpback whale’s penis entering another male. Same-sex behaviour has often been observed in cetaceans. Photograph: Lyle Krannichfeld and Brandi Romano/Marine Mammal Science
Ryan has often witnessed same-sex behaviour between whales and dolphins. “I am interested in the things that we miss,” he says. He has recorded competitive behaviour by humpback whales in groups that seemed to be typically male, such as pursuing other whales.
But they proved, from DNA samples, to be genetically female. He speculates that humpback females may even use whale song – hitherto thought to be the province of mating males.
“If I were a female being harassed by horny males, maybe I would sing too,” says Ryan. “To attract more females, to take attention off me, while masquerading as a male.”
These observations throw up new ideas about the way these animals behave. Whale society is almost overwhelmingly matriarchal. Female sperm whales, for example, travel in large groups – sometimes thousands strong – in which males are only “useful” for their sperm, visiting the groups briefly, then leaving the females to their own society.
Male-oriented science has in the past made various judgments regarding sexual behaviour. But the idea of lesbian whales should not be surprising. Ryan even cites the case of a “non-binary” beaked whale, which was discovered to have both male and female genitalia.
Even identifying as a species can be fluid for cetaceans. In 2022, near Caithness in Scotland, a bottlenose dolphin was found to be identifying as a porpoise, swimming with a pod of porpoises and using their vocalisations. In one of the great queer pairings of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf referred to her lover, Vita Sackville-West, as “my porpoise”.
We cannot know how whales and dolphins themselves regard genital interactions. But in most cases they appear to enjoy them – without, perhaps, the preconceptions we humans as a species have historically projected upon such behaviour. They may make great clickbait on social media, but they have an important relevance for us, too.
When the Canadian biologist Bruce Bagemihl published his book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity – listing 450 species exhibiting such behaviour, including whales and dolphins – it was used in evidence in a US supreme court case in 2003 that struck down, as unconstitutional, homophobic “sodomy” laws being used in Texas.
It is telling, too, that the best-known work of literary fiction written about whales, Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, is a decidedly queer book. Melville conflates the queerness and diversity of his characters – his narrator, Ishmael, is declaredmarried to his shipmate, the multi-tattooed Queequeg, based on a Māori warrior – with the mysterious sensuality of the whales he is describing. He even spends an entire chapter describing a whale’s foreskin, with joyful innuendo.
The sea itself seems to be a queer place, where gender is at best a slippery notion at times. Slipper shells stuck together on the beach, which you might find when beachcombing, are in fact changing sex, from female at the bottom to male at the top. Cetaceans’ genitals are concealed, in any case, in genital slits. Sleek and streamlined, it is as if bothersome sexual definitions were overtaken by the sheer beauty of wondrous hydrodynamics.
So much of what we project on to whales and dolphins is about our own complexes. They seem to lead a free and easy life. They may not possess hands to manipulate, but they have the biggest brains on the planet, and highly sensual bodies to match. Having been around for millions of years, it is tempting to imagine their long-evolved existence as one that is beyond all the things that seem to hold us humans back.
Remember that for 50 or longer these hate churches have long claimed that being gay is unnatural, that two men having sex or two women having sex is unnatural because that is the phrasing in their old book. Yes the book written before people understood about germs. Now it is being shown to them it is natural. Oh crap they can’t have that. Hugs. Scottie
A new series from NBC called Queer Planet is providing fascinating looks at both homosexuality in the animal kingdom and at the people apparently incapable of even acknowledging that it exists. The trailer for the documentary series was released on May 17th and gave a preview of a “rich diversity of animal sexuality” with gay penguins, bisexual lions and sex-changing clownfish.
Despite the fact that there’s plenty of scientific basis for animals displaying homosexual behaviour (over 1500 species of animals, in fact), the trailer has caused intense outrage from conservatives who predictably think the series is pushing an agenda. Sentiments are similar in the YouTube comments for the trailer, which has been overwhelmingly swamped with dislikes. “This is actual insanity,” reads the top comment.
Read the full article. The series, narrated by Broadway star Andrew Rannells, debuts on Peacock on June 6th. The cult is busy on X declaring that they will cancel their Peacock subscriptions.
"Queer Planet" will be released in June.
The documentary by NBC is focused on "LGBTQI+ tolerance" among the animal kingdom…
Fundies: Being gay is wrong and goes against god and nature Gays: Being gay is normal, it happens in all mammals, here’s proof Fundies: LALALALA *fingers in ears*
So during Easter there’s always a bunch of Jesus programming that I can stream if I choose.
I choose not to.
That doesn’t mean I feel that I have the right to not allow anybody else to stream these programs. Do I get butt hurt over it? No, I don’t even mention it to friends and family.
I don’t know how these people can have such a narrow world view
I normally don’t care about the consensual sex adults have. I don’t care about others kinks or how they get their “freak” on. I think sex is a great thing and very enjoyable. But these assholes were going around telling others they needed to be more moal, that same sex marriage was against gods law, they argued and fought for LGBTQ+ stuff removed from libraries and schools, the claimed teachers who supported gay and trans kids were groomers sexualizing the kids and forcing them gay or trans. The made the LGBTQ+ out to be horrible monsters who were an abomination to god. They made being Christian the only way to live and constantly made news pushing their version of Christianity, pushing their god.
At the same time they were having same sex relations and multiple sex partners! This is what pisses me off about these phonies. Hugs. Scottie
Quotes from the linked article.
Det. Angela Cox said police continued to investigate, though, whether Ziegler had reason to believe she was not competent at that time to offer consent. Communications indicated that the two scheduled a threesome with the Zieglers, but that the woman asked Christian not to show up when she learned Bridget would not be there.
Of note, the Center during the hearing published a report on its media site, the Florida Trident, which included parts of a report by Cox not yet publicly released. That detailed conversations between Bridget and Christian about him hunting for women in local bars to bring home, with one text from Bridget telling her husband, “Don’t come home until your dick is wet.”
“Are there other videos or photographs on your phone that depict other sexual activity with other people other than Mrs. Ziegler?” Bentley asked Christian Ziegler.
“I believe so,” he replied, with Bridget Ziegler in the courtroom yards away.
He also said any people depicted in those videos were “willing participants” both in the sexual acts and with being filmed.
Ousted Republican Party of Florida Chair Christian Ziegler acknowledged in court that he kept numerous videos of sexual partners besides his wife. Sarasota Police have copies of much of that, and some 30,000 videos downloaded from Ziegler’s iPhone last year.
Ziegler testified on the topic in a May 16 hearing in Sarasota as he and wife Bridget, a Sarasota County School Board member, try to stop the further release of embarrassing information. But just fighting the publishing of video has already put Ziegler in the position of discussing the case in open court.
“Are there other videos or photographs on your phone that depict other sexual activity with other people other than Mrs. Ziegler?” Bentley asked Christian Ziegler. “I believe so,” he replied. He also said any people depicted in those videos were “willing participants” both in the sexual acts and with being filmed.
I’m generally totally onboard with people being free to do what they like in terms of intimate relationships, sexual preferences and all that. But I draw the line at hypocrisy, where you spend all your time trying to force other people to live by arbitrary, Puritanical rules from which you exempt your own behavior.
I’m generally totally onboard with people being free to do what they like in terms of intimate relationships, sexual preferences and all that. But I draw the line at hypocrisy, where you spend all your time trying to force other people to live by arbitrary, Puritanical rules from which you exempt your own behavior.
Christian pervs trying to forbid mention of LGBT people existing, think ‘They were consenting adults’ (if not given a mickey) … excuses their massive hypocrisy while demanding Christian Morality be imposed on everyone else’s lives and educations or else.
Again these people are terrified of sex. The only good sex in their minds results in a woman being forced to carry a fetus to term and give birth. What I can not figure out is why they are this way. We all know they have mistresses and side boys. But they don’t want you to have one. Hugs. Scottie
Former President Donald Trump arrives at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York, Thursday, May 9, 2024.
Angela Weiss/Pool/AP
For the past several weeks, witnesses in Donald Trump’s hush money trial have evoked a chapter of his past when the adult entertainment industry helped him brandish an image as a Manhattan playboy.
If some of the former president’s allies get their way, a second Trump term would put that industry on the ropes – and potentially its actors and producers behind bars.
A movement to rein in online pornography is rapidly intensifying, fueled by conservative outrage and growing unease over the accessibility of sexual content online, especially for children. In dozens of states, the porn industry is on the defense and facing new threats to its existence after decades of expansion in the internet era.
Now, those cheering on the effort are preparing to take the push national, putting porn producers as well as teachers, librarians and tech companies on notice – and they increasingly view Trump as a potential linchpin in the coming fight.
“It’s a very good opportunity for President Trump to continue to build on his legacy of being supportive of working families and children,” said Terry Schilling, the president of American Principles Project, one of the driving forces behind the new state laws.
The cause has support within some of the highest reaches of Trump’s orbit, including the Heritage Foundation, a Washington, DC-based conservative think tank that is already laying the groundwork for the Republican’s potential return to the White House. Through its Project 2025 initiative, the organization published a 900-page blueprint for another Trump term. Pornography is mentioned on the first page; banning pornography and locking up those who produce it are proposed on Page 5.
At first glance, Trump appears an unlikely champion for cracking down on the adult entertainment industry. Long before launching a political career, Trump developed a history with Playboy, the men’s magazine that helped mainstream pornography and pioneered its place in the lawfare over free speech. He was an occasional guest at Hugh Hefner’s famed Playboy Mansion and made cameos in soft-core pornographic films produced by the company – though not in any scenes depicting sexual content or nudity. During his 2016 race, he proudly displayed an issue of Playboy magazine that featured him on the cover.
Allegations stemming from that period – including affairs with porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy centerfold Karen McDougal – sit at the heart of the Manhattan district attorney’s case against Trump, the first criminal prosecution of an American president. McDougal has previously claimed she met Trump at the Playboy Mansion, an encounter she said led to an eight-month affair. In testimony last week, Daniels said her 2006 tryst with Trump occurred at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe where her adult film company sponsored a hole.
Trump has denied the allegations.
Heritage President Kevin Roberts is unconcerned by Trump’s past. He likened it to the parable of the prodigal son, a New Testament teaching about paternal forgiveness granted to a man who squanders his father’s fortune with indulgences.
“We understand our lord works with imperfect instruments, including us,” Roberts said in a recent interview with CNN. “While on the surface it seems like a contradiction, on the whole, it may make him a more powerful messenger if he embraces it.”
Roberts hasn’t discussed the topic directly with Trump, but he has talked to the campaign and said there is alignment among those who have policy influence, including Ben Carson, the former secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Charlie Kirk, the founder of the conservative young voter group Turning Points USA and a close Trump ally, has also made curbing pornography a recurring focus of his popular podcast.
“Without being presumptuous of the president’s will, there will at least be conversations on this being a priority we can tackle,” Roberts said.
Asked about the focus on pornography by Project 2025 and other closely aligned groups, Trump’s campaign pointed to a past statement from its top advisers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, downplaying any connection between those organizations and the former president’s plans for a second term.
“Let us be very specific here: unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official,” the statement from LaCivita and Wiles said.
‘Sex is the canary in the coal mine’
The Supreme Court has deemed previous attempts to curb online pornography unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. But Schilling’s group and others have successfully pushed a growing number of states to test the legal system once again.
In the past two years, 10 states have moved to force adult websites to verify the age of their users – often with bipartisan support – and legislatures in two dozen others are considering nearly identical legislation, according to a bill tracker maintained by the Free Speech Coalition, the advocacy group for the online pornography industry. In some states, porn websites cannot be accessed without showing identification confirming the user is over 18 years of age.
Supporters of these laws argue the tools for restricting websites have become more sophisticated in the two decades since the Supreme Court struck down Congress’ first stab at requiring age checks. They point to industries such as online gambling and mobile alcohol sales that have successfully integrated age verifications. Meanwhile, the availability of the internet has made it much easier for sexual content to reach kids in a way that necessitates legislative action, they say.
The porn industry and free speech advocates contend these laws violate the First Amendment rights of consenting adults to produce and view sexual content. Requiring a government-issued ID to watch pornography is akin to having Big Brother peer into the most intimate quarters of Americans’ personal lives, they argue.
The US Supreme Court last month declined to block the Texas version of the law from taking effect while an appeal is considered.
“Sex is the canary in the coal mine of free speech,” said Mike Stabile, spokesman for the Free Speech Coalition. “It may sound good to create age-verification laws, but what these people are really trying to do is create a larger censorship regime so that you have to show who you are to access sensitive content.”
Pornhub, one of the most trafficked websites in the world, and its sister sites have blocked access in seven states – Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, Arkansas, Utah, Mississippi and Texas – as a means to comply with new laws.
The adult industry insists it doesn’t want children accessing its material but says the onus should be on Apple, Google and other device makers to sell phones and tablets with default settings that ensure kids can’t access adult content, an alternative that technology companies oppose.
“Parents, not the government, are best positioned to make these judgments based on their own family’s unique needs and values,” said Robert Winterton, spokesman for NetChoice, an organization that represents tech companies including Amazon, X and Facebook. “One-size-fits-all mandates are unlikely to be effective and risk undermining the constitutional and parental authority.”
Purveyors of online pornography have long assumed the recent wave of age-restriction laws is a means to put them out of business. In Louisiana, the first state to pass such laws, Pornhub saw an 80% decline in traffic, executives for the company told CNN, citing Google Analytics data.
Heritage’s Project 2025 has given credence to their concerns. It likens pornography to illicit drugs in declaring the content “should be outlawed” and “the people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” Teachers and librarians who distribute content Heritage deems pornographic “should be classified as registered sex offenders,” the document continues, and tech companies that facilitate its spread “should be shuttered.”
“We see pornography as undermining the public good, not just for children but all adults,” Roberts told CNN. “We think that’s in the purview of Congress.”
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation – a leading advocate against pornography that for most of its existence went by the name “Morality in Media” and has worked closely on these state laws – has also publicly stated its goal is “to ensure the online pornography industry is taken down once and for all.”
“These laws don’t work because they weren’t designed to work,” said Solomon Friedman, a lawyer and co-founding partner of Ethical Capital Partners, the Canadian firm that purchased Pornhub last year. “They weren’t designed to protect young people from accessing adult content. They were designed to protect adults from accessing adult content, which, of course, is their stated aim. It’s not a conspiracy theory when it’s written on Page 1.”
Schilling disputed that his organization is working toward a federal prohibition on porn, telling CNN: “It’s been tough enough getting legislators on board with age verification.”
“Politics and public policy have to be based in political reality,” he said.
Given Heritage’s influence – the organization is full of the former president’s staff, and the person leading Project 2025, Paul Dans, is a former Trump administration official who told a recent gathering of religious broadcasters that he expects to return to the White House if Republicans are victorious this fall – they are not dismissing the threat, Stabile said.
“We’re taking it deathly seriously,” Stabile said. “Not just for us, but for all kinds of communities around sex or gender. This isn’t a joke to us. This isn’t theoretical.”
Next steps
Schilling and others want a Trump administration to more aggressively use the US Department of Justice to utilize existing laws to target content they view as obscene. They have also proposed a federal version of age-verification legislation that has successfully passed in states.
“It’s gotta go national,” Schilling said. “Why should kids from California not be protected from pornography online?”
Any law signed by Trump would run into the same constitutional objections raised by the US Supreme Court in the past, said Stuart Brotman, a media professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Proponents hope the court, which skews conservative and includes three Trump appointees, will take a different view. Brotman – who has written extensively on pornography and free speech, including a book on Playboy’s Hefner – is skeptical.
“The Roberts court has been considered a highly First Amendment-friendly court,” Brotman said. “It would be difficult for some of the justices now to indicate there’s a more narrow view of the First amendment.”
If Trump chooses to embrace this cause, it wouldn’t be the first time. The GOP platform when he was first nominated in 2016 said pornography was “destroying the lives of millions.” That same year, Trump signed a pledge that he would consider a presidential commission to examine the “public health impact of Internet pornography on youth, families and the American culture.”
Advocates were ultimately let down by his administration, said Ben Bull, general counsel for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
“We don’t know if it’s political expediency or if it’s heartfelt this time,” Bull said. “We’ll see. But people are only going to be fooled for so long.”
A humpback whale’s penis entering another male. Same-sex behaviour has often been observed in cetaceans.
Photograph: Lyle Krannichfeld and Brandi Romano/Marine Mammal Science
Former President Donald Trump arrives at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York, Thursday, May 9, 2024.
Scottie's Playtime 
All is well. So many things tend to work out for the very best.
Here’s a new link. I’ve been reading Oliver Willis for years, and I really like his work. You’ve probably seen his work around. I now subscribe (for free) to his work on Substack, and here is the one he posted today. Bonus on each post is a photo of his doggy Kal-El, who looks like our Chrissy back when she was that age (she crossed the bridge in 2020 at age 21.) Anyway, back to the link: https://www.oliverexplains.com/p/how-boring-lgbtq-people-made-america . Enjoy when you get to it!