WASHINGTON — The Washington Examiner published on Tuesday an op-ed by a Christian-right ideologue, supporting Project 2025’s proposal to criminalize the production and distribution of adult content and condemning pornography as “a social, mental, and spiritual epidemic of high proportions.”
Titled “Project 2025 should accept its pro-pornography critiques as a badge of honor,” the article, in the conservative newspaper was penned by Adam Carrington, a clergyman and assistant professor of politics at Ashland University in Ohio where he also serves as co-director of influential conservative training institute the Ashbrook Center.
Carrington’s virulently anti-porn op-ed ran as part of the Examiner’s ultraconservative propaganda series “Restoring America,” which — despite this most recent call for massive censorship — unironically lists among its objectives supporting policies that “promote freedom and resist central control.”
Responding to the new performer-driven #HandsOffMyPorn campaign launched this week by industry figures to bring attention to Project 2025’s extreme proposals, Carrington argues that Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation should view such opposition as a source of pride.
“Much more should be done, legally and culturally, to limit, suppress and ostracize the making and consumption of pornography,” Carrington writes, ignoring the multiple testimonials by #HandsOffMyPorn supporters that they are freely choosing their work as he justifies his position on the grounds that adult content “degrades the people involved, regardless of why they participate or how they think about their participation.”
Everyone in the adult industry, the conservative academic continues, is “destroying the link between the sexual act and the rest of our humanity. Pornography severs the relational link, wherein sex expresses loving intimacy within the protective confines of stable, healthy marriages. Pornography destroys the procreative link, whereby the act remains open to the creation of the next generation of human beings. Finally, it damages our link to God, disobeying his natural — and revealed — law that orders our lives for our physical, emotional, and spiritual health.”
Carrington expresses contempt for people who choose to watch adult content, theorizing, “Pornography also degrades the persons consuming it. They participate in the severed links described above that plague participants in this industry. Severing sex from relationships also affects their real-life marriages and friendships. It facilitates treating other human beings as objects to be used for one’s own selfish pleasure.”
Endorsing debunked pseudoscientific notions, Carrington claims that pornography also “addicts its watchers to cheap and ugly thrills, fueling fetishes and their ilk.”
Instead, he mandates, “We should be engaging with each other through the long-term contentment of monogamy.”
Carrington goes on to claim that “pornography consumption makes friendship harder as well, for it accentuates the sexualization of everyone and everything.”
He concludes by asserting that adult content “is a social, mental, and spiritual epidemic of high proportions” before calling for “limiting and suppressing this malicious industry” by the federal government.
Main Image: Clergyman academic Prof. Adam Carrington