(Update August 3rd, 2024 – A lot has happened in the news in the last four weeks since I posted this. At the end of this blog post I added a little update here.)

I’m always reluctant to discuss politics or religion on this blog. It’s usually a no-win situation discussing such things, and the likelihood of being misunderstood or of offending some readers is almost inevitable. My own politic beliefs don’t really matter to the discussion here, so I won’t get into them much, but one thing that I’ve been following lately is news on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, especially its views regarding pornography and LGBTQ people.

If you’re not familiar with Project 2025, it’s basically a plan of action to remake the United States in an uber-conservative Christian nationalist mold. It includes a 900+ page policy proposal titled: Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. I have an old friend who describes himself as conservative, but the proposals outlined here take that word to a whole new level. Let me be clear that I have nothing against religion. I was baptized Catholic as a kid, though it didn’t really stick. But I still often went to Christmas Eve services, and I still sometimes miss those times. The rise of Christian nationalism, though, is something entirely different from being your average churchgoer, and it’s quite worrisome.

The following quote from Mandate for Leadership has been widely commented on elsewhere. It’s a doozy and appears on page five of the Forward (emphasis added by me):

“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. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

What’s so telling in the paragraph above is that they’re saying that any material that refers to LGBTQ people, even benign material, is by its very nature pornographic – thus the line about librarians and educators “purveying” porn. From this extreme perspective, even mentioning in a book the fact that gay and trans people exist would be considered pornographic. This is chilling, and if put in place would force the removal of all kinds of books that no one would ever mistake for pornography.

I’ve been aware for years that running a fetish porn website could conceivably cause legal problems for me someday if the political climate were to change dramatically. But I’ll admit this is the first time that I actually feel some sense of concern. I’m certainly not panicking and I have no plans to move to Canada or Mexico, but I do have a feeling that things could become riskier in the coming years being in the porn website business. The idea of ending up arrested for running Trannies In Trouble would be like something out of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” (hopefully with the leather bondage sacks that appear in that classic film!). But if these policies were put in place – and yes, that is a big if but not inconceivable – then porn producers could actually end up being arrested, not for obscenity but for allegedly being a menace to public health.

I also wonder about the logistical questions that come to mind. Are the authors of Project 2025 talking about only arresting the owners and producers of the bigger porn companies or are they looking to also go after small website producers like me? What about OnlyFans producers or people on Fetlife who just like to take naughty pictures? How about technical people and camera operators and editors? Are we talking just a few hundred arrests or tens of thousands? Or is it maybe hundreds of thousands or millions of people put in prison with all the new prisons and camps that would have to be built to house them? Then there are the economic questions. Do you really want all the commerce and tax dollars generated by porn to just go away in a matter of months? There are so many logistical questions that I really want to know!

And as an aside, this does raise the question: why are we Americans so quick to lock up our fellow citizens? What is it about the American psyche that drives us to have such high rates of incarceration? The proposals discussed above would only drive that rate up even higher.

As I’ve mentioned before, if the government wanted to wipe out the porn business it would be easier to do it through legislation rather than arrests, although arrests would have the added benefit of creating fear. I’ve already written about the case of Insex, where Homeland Security got their billing company to drop them under a pretext. Homeland Security could just as easily tell the major billing companies that due to security or public health concerns they should no longer process credit cards for porn sites. Just for good measure, they could always remind the billing companies what a hassle it would be if they were to get audited.

Another good way to shut down porn sites would be to simply pass more legislation making it more and more of a pain to stay in business. A national age verification law that has all kinds of onerous provisions could easily cause many producers to simply call it quits, as Pornhub has already done in the states with current age verification requirements. Currently California has a possible age verification law, AB 3080, working its way through the legislature in Sacramento, though it hasn’t yet passed. As I’ve said before, I would be totally fine with a workable age verification system that doesn’t drive customers away. But no one wants to have to upload a copy of their driver’s license to visit a porn site or have a government agency keep track of their porn habits. I’d hate to imagine Trannies in Trouble finally shutting down because of the legal climate but I do have to face the reality that it’s not inconceivable. I don’t want to sound like I’m crying wolf but there’s certainly a nationwide push moving against online porn.

Returning to Project 2025, I know some people will probably say, “Oh, that could never happen here,” and dismiss it as an overly dramatic political wish list from some think tank (a very powerful and influential think tank, by the way). But I’m not so sure. I think it actually could happen, and maybe wouldn’t even be that difficult to put in place if things lined up in its favor with a few more sweeping court decisions after the next election. We have this idea that our system of checks and balances will always be there. Again, I’m not so sure.

I have no idea where this kind of extreme thinking is heading but it is yet another thing that I try to follow. The idea of going to prison after twenty-some years of Trannies in Trouble would be almost comical if it wasn’t so frightening. I grudgingly admit there would be a certain poetic logic if I were to end my days incarcerated. It would be like, “Well, she was always into bondage and captivity, serves her right!”

In the meantime, I find myself reading way more about Project 2025 than I’d like. And I follow the email updates from The Free Speech Coalition (of which I’m a paying member), and who probably have a better pulse on what’s happening in the porn business than just about anyone. Only time will tell how paranoid or clear eyed I’m being here. Thanks for indulging me if you’ve gotten this far. Again, I’d much rather be writing about something sexy instead of all this. But I expect there will be more to report.

Update August 3rd, 2024 – As mentioned at the start of this post, the news has moved pretty quickly, with a significant backlash to Project 2025’s extreme positions. News stories are so often written to be entertaining and to maximize drama, so it’s hard to say how accurate all the reporting is, but Politico recently had an interesting article about a journalist’s underwhelming visit to Project 2025’s headquarters. I’m not sure I know anyone who’s pro-Project 2025, especially when it comes to banning porn, but regardless of your politics it’s an interesting read.