WASHINGTON — Arizona Republican congressman Paul Gosar made comments on social media Wednesday questioning longstanding jurisprudence protecting sexual expression as free speech under the First Amendment.
With the remarks, the Arizona member of the House of Representatives joined a chorus of mainstream conservative voices attempting, in the days since the Uvalde, Texas mass shooting, to blame “pornography” for the increased instances of gun violence in America.
Gosar, a dentist-turned-politician who became notorious early in his political life when his own family recorded ads urging people not to vote for him, took to Twitter this week in support of statements made by a fellow GOP politician, Ohio senatorial candidate J.D. Vance.
As XBIZ reported, Vance — a venture capitalist, Peter Thiel protegé and author of “Hillbilly Elegy” — told Catholic magazine Crisis last year that he was seeking an “outright ban” on all porn.
“J.D. Vance is right to call for restrictions on pornography,” Gosar tweeted Wednesday. “Liberal courts have declared porn to fall under ‘free speech.’ What a joke.”
Gosar added that “porn is simply too accessible, not to mention the rampant drug abuse and sex trafficking within this subversive, immoral industry.
“This, combined with the horrible effects it's having on our young men and women, means that one who opposes any restrictions on porn is ignorant at best and malicious at worst. This should be common sense. But leftists refuse to budge an inch for the sake of sexual immorality,” he continued.
Gosar, whose alleged involvement with the January 6, 2021 insurrection reportedly came under scrutiny from lawmakers at the House select committee investigating the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, later tweeted, “I’m not a prude. But the flimsy ‘porn is protected free speech’ argument wasn't true 50 years ago and it's not true now. Porn does not empower women or men, it actually harms them and their brains. It's simple gratuitous prurience.”
Today, Gosar retweeted a video statement by his colleague, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, asking Republicans to be “proud of Christian Nationalism.”
Rep. Taylor Greene argued that the Christian Nationalism movement, to which she belongs, will end school shootings, street crime and "sexual immorality."
A Cacophony of Republican and Conservative Voices
Over the last week, mainstream Republican politicians and conservative pundits have been repeating baseless talking points asserting a connection between “pornography” and armed violence.
The only recently recorded link between pornography and a mass shooting — the Atlanta massacre of spa workers by a Christian terrorist on March 16, 2021 — actually underscored the connection between targeted violence and anti-porn rhetoric and dubious “conversion therapies” for supposed “porn addicts.”
Tom Basile, who bills himself as “the host of ‘America Right Now’ on Newsmax Television, an author and a former Bush administration official,” penned an op-ed last Friday for the Washington Times in which he minimizes the effect gun control and other policies may have in curbing repeated occurrences of mass violence.
“Faith and wisdom, not government and politics, will elevate the nation and strengthen the souls of those who otherwise might turn to drugs, pornography, self-mutilation and violence,” Basile wrote.
Another right-wing news source, the Epoch Times, published Saturday an op-ed by Wesley J. Smith, whom the paper describes as “host of the ‘Humanize Podcast,’ chairman of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism and a consultant to the Patients Rights Council.”
In a poorly reasoned and factually sparse diatribe headlined “America’s Anti-Child Culture,” Smith links the Uvalde massacre to “abortion,” “transgender panic” and “ready access to obscene pornography on the internet, which reports say can distort the development of healthy sexuality.”
Both editorials surfaced around the time West Virginia's governor, mainstream Republican Jim Justice, gave a rambling response to a local clergyman’s call for gun control reform, stating, “We absolutely know without any question, to me, at least, that why in the world is an 18-year-old buying an assault weapon? A 21-year-old, I’d welcome it. But really and truly, we know all of the stuff that’s going on on social media, all across the land. We know the profanity. We know all the different stuff, all the porn, all the bad stuff that is out there that is getting in the minds of our children. We know all the violent video games getting in the mind of our children. Why don’t we do something about it?”
