COLUMBUS, Ohio — Recent coverage of Ohio Republican J.D. Vance, a candidate for the U.S. Senate, has foregrounded a year-old interview with a Catholic publication where he calls for an “outright ban” on porn.
Vance rose to fame as the author of the nonfiction bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy.” He gave the interview in August 2021 to the MAGA-friendly Crisis Magazine, and it seems possible that his own campaign is behind the renewed attention to the statements in order to court anti-porn voters following his win in the Ohio primary on May 3.
The 2021 Crisis Magazine article was headlined “The Political Path Forward: Get Married and Have Kids.”
Vance is a Harvard-educated venture capitalist who, after the success of “Hillbilly Elegy,” became a Republican politician backed and encouraged by conservative ideologue and billionaire Peter Thiel. Vance told Crisis that “the only metric that should matter” in American society is that “our birth rate continues to go down.”
“I think the combination of porn, abortion have basically created a really lonely, isolated generation that isn’t getting married, they’re not having families and they’re actually not even totally sure how to interact with each other,” he told interviewer Jessica Kramer.
When asked for his thoughts on porn and birth control and their effects on familial decline, Kramer wrote, “Vance admitted he wants to outright ban pornography.”
Kramer finished her piece by writing, "As a single Catholic woman in her twenties who knows plenty of other young single women, I don’t need to be convinced that marriage and family are what will change the culture and prove to be more fulfilling than devoting ourselves to the post-industrial workforce. What we need convincing of, though, is that there are apt men to marry. What we need is not a new economic proposal, but a revival of men willing to put to death the culture of self that has kept them from the Church, and who believe that the family they form will be what actually what makes America great again."
The article resurfaced this week thanks to the Huff Post, Uproxx and a slew of smaller conservative news sites.
Vance’s campaign declined to provide the Huff Post’s Liz Skalka with any comment regarding “his more recent thoughts on porn, and how they would factor into his priorities as a senator.”
Skalka pointed out that the last time the GOP drafted an official platform, in 2016, it declared porn “a public health crisis.” The GOP shelved that platform after Donald Trump’s nomination and has deliberately refrained from putting its agenda in any formal document ever since, with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) as the main enforcer among his colleagues of the “no platform” stance.
One of Vance’s main supporters within the GOP, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), has made a number of controversial statements about “pornography,” indicating he sees male masturbation as an attack on “masculinity” and claiming it is part of a 1960s-1970s “sexual revolution” that resulted in social decadence in America.
“Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games?” Hawley remarked at the National Conservative Conference a few months ago.
At the same conference, Vance opined that the United States “made a political choice that the freedom to consume pornography was more important than the public good, like marriage and family and happiness. We can’t ignore the fact that we made that choice and we shouldn’t shy away from the fact that we can make new choices in the future.”