Conservatives Want the Federal Government to Ban Pornography
July 6, 2026
Writing for the Heritage Foundation, the premier conservative think tank, Scott Yenor and Caleb Pirc have issued a new Heritage Foundation backgrounder, “Is General Obscenity Still Illegal? A Postmortem on the Bush Obscenity Prosecution Task Force,” that “examines the last serious federal effort to deal with the scourge of pornography and charts a path forward.” Read their report here. I am no defender of pornography, and agree with many of the negative things that Yenor and Pirc say about porn, but a government with the power to ban pornography is a government with the power to ban anything, including things that conservatives like. Are Yenor and Pirc really that stupid?
Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He is the author of The Free Society; War, Christianity, and the State: Essays on the Follies of Christian Militarism; War, Empire, and the Military: Essays on the Follies of War and U.S. Foreign Policy; King James, His Bible, and Its Translators, and many other books. His newest book is The U.S. Proxy War in Ukraine.
