The pro-pornography party

Last week, a new political advertisement supporting Democrats appeared featuring a young man using pornography while lying alone in bed. An austere old man in a suit suddenly appears out of nowhere and seizes the young man’s mobile phone, saying, “Sorry, you can’t do that.”

The startled young man exclaims with shock, asking the man how he got into his room. The old man growls, “I’m your Republican Congressman. Now that we’re in charge, we’re banning porn nationwide.”

Outraged, the young man rails, “You can’t tell me what to do. Get out of my bedroom you creep!” The elderly congressman replies, “I won the last election, so it’s my decision. …”

I’m not even going to tell you about the rest of the dialogue because it’s too lewd to share with a Christian audience. Nor am I going to provide a link to the video, which itself is pornographic and includes sounds from the pornography on the young man’s phone. I do not recommend that you look for the video, either.

The ad was produced by two groups trying to get out the vote for Democrats in the upcoming election: the Progress Action Fund and Defend the Vote. The Project Action Fund says the video is a part of a $2.5 million ad campaign running in all seven swing states: Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and North Carolina. It’s also playing on streaming services, according to a report by Erick Erickson, including YouTube and Pornhub.

The point of the ad is really clear. It is to portray Republicans as perverts who are a little too interested in the sex lives of young men and are self-indulgent while trying to ban pornography for everyone else. In other words, if you want to keep your access to pornography, vote for Democrats.

In an article on the super PAC’s website, the founder of Progress Action Fund, Joe Jacobson, explains, “The Republican Party is led by weird old men who are committed to invading our bedrooms. … As a 30-year-old guy myself, the GOP’s insistence on legislating our personal lives and decisions is disturbing and unacceptable. That is why we’re working to ensure everyone knows that the G.O.P really stands for ‘Grand Old Perverts.’”

The article goes on to decry state-level efforts to restrict pornography and legislative initiatives to keep such material out of the hands of minor children. But Jacobson never mentions the fact that federal bans on pornography are not in the offing from Republicans.

There is so much wrong with this ad that it is hard to know where to begin. For starters, the video amounts to a giant smear against anyone who favors policies that would restrict the production and dissemination of pornography. The producers allege that opposition to pornography is a cynical ploy by self-loathing puritans who secretly and hypocritically engage in their own forms of perverse voyeurism. It’s a cheap slander that avoids the very real problems with pornography.

This ad is aimed at young men, for whom pornography has been a ubiquitous fixture in their lives for years now. In 2007, broadband internet reached more than 50 percent of American households. In 2013, smartphone ownership exceeded 50 percent of the population. That means that at some point around 2007, more Americans than not had access not simply to still images but to videos of people engaged in sex acts. By 2013, more Americans than not had access to video porn at any time and any place through their smartphone.

According to credible reports, the average age that a young man first encounters pornography is between 11 and 13 years old. That means that countless young men have spent the better part of the last decade with their brains marinating in such video content. For many of them, everything they have learned about sex has come from pornography. Their sexual preferences have been shaped by this filth. It is therefore no surprise that the Pornhub website receives an estimated 115 million hits per day. Countless millions are addicted to this content.

And what is the result? Pornography is delivering to us a generation of men who think of women as objects to be used and abused for their sexual pleasure. It has not given us men who know what virtue and honor are. It doesn’t teach men to pursue their joy in self-sacrificially loving and being sexually faithful to one woman for life. It teaches young men to use women for sex and then to discard them when they become unwilling or uninteresting. Pornography is giving us a generation of young men completely unprepared for marriage and fatherhood. When marriage and fatherhood die, so does your civilization.

Anyone who understands the calamity that pornography has visited on the masses understands that the government has an interest in restricting this content. Is it any wonder that at least some Americans and their elected representatives see it as a national priority to restrict this material?

This political ad misses all of that. Even worse, the ad itself is indecent and is worthy of public condemnation. Obviously, the producers of this advertisement thought it would be a humorous way to lampoon their political opponents. But pornography isn’t funny; it’s a vice. God isn’t laughing, and no one else should be either.