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The internet, as the song goes, is for porn. In fact, one can argue the internet is the single greatest repository of pornography in human history, with everything else it does a distant second in every respect. That doesn’t sit well with some people, though, and anti-porn group Enough Is Enough has managed to get Donald Trump, a popular target of porn parodies, to agree to fight it if he’s elected President.
Enough Is Enough got some press recently for getting McDonald’s to block porn on their public WiFi, even though the group admitted in their own press release that neither they nor McDonald’s had any record of anybody using it for that purpose. Most of the pledge, much like the McDonald’s campaign, has little to do with internet porn at all. Mostly, it’s focused on genuine concerns about use of the internet in human trafficking and distributing child pornography, which any politician should be worried about. But snuck in among the language is this passage:
Give serious consideration to appointing a Presidential Commission to examine the harmful public health impact of Internet pornography on youth, families and the American culture and the prevention of the sexual exploitation of children in the digital age.
Lumping material made by adults for adults is a popular strategy amongst the anti-porn crowd, which is a problem not least because it pairs issues with clear social imperatives with much more legally and morally complex ones. Leaving that aside, though, there is the question of how you’d “examine” this in the first place. The pledge itself is woefully short on genuine, unbiased scientific research, not least because the unethical nature of plopping a first-grade class in front of RedTube should be glaringly obvious. And with that by the boards, Trump signed this pledge two weeks after a lawsuit was filed against him accusing him of sexually assaulting a teenage girl multiple times in the summer of 1994.
The Clinton campaign hasn’t signed the pledge, as it’s a point of campaign policy not to sign any pledge, according to Enough Is Enough. And it’s safe to assume everyone agrees material made by adults for adults shouldn’t be seen by children, and that human trafficking is an awful crime we must prevent. But Presidential candidates and advocacy groups would likely be taken more seriously if they focused on data rather than gut feelings on issues like porn.
(Via Houston Chronicle)
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