Virginia Bob Marshall’s Progressive War on Porn: New at Reason

Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall is targeting pornography.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

Del. Robert Marshall and his liberal critics might be appalled by the suggestion that they share anything in common. Marshall ferociously opposes abortion, he co-sponsored Virginia’s constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and he once even tried to prohibit single women from getting pregnant through artificial insemination. But while he and those on the left differ on policy specifics, they share a core assumption.

This year the Prince William delegate wants the General Assembly to take a stand against porn. He has drafted a resolution declaring pornography a public health hazard and advocating a “policy change . . . to address the pornography epidemic.”

The resolution is problematic, and not just because it draws no distinctions between, say, airbrushed Playboy centerfolds and stomach-turning torture porn. It makes a variety of declarations that vary from debatable to patently false—e.g., that pornography “normalizes violence,” that it leads to “low self-esteem,” that it produces “dissatisfaction in marriage” and has a “detrimental effect on the family unit” and that “overcoming pornography’s harms is beyond the capability of the afflicted individual to address alone.”

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