
Photograph Source: Sir Morosus – CC BY 4.0
The moralistic Christian right have achieved significant political power through Donald Trump’s presidency, the Republican control of both Houses of Congress, and a conservative majority of Judges on the Supreme Court. Together, they are promoting a new, second-round of the modern porn wars that, like the earlier round that lasted from the mid-1940s thru mid-50s, focuses on the censorship of alleged porn targeted toward adolescent or “minor” youths.
During the period of 1947 to ’49, more than one hundred cities across the country, big and small, passed laws or ordinances to ban the display or sale of comic books. Comic book campaigns took place in Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles as well as in Baltimore, Cleveland, Hartford, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, New Orleans and Sacramento and in Ann Arbor (MI), Coral Gables (FL), Falls Church (VA), Hillsdale (MI), Mt. Prospect (IL) and Nashua (NH).
Efforts to censor comics were probably the most contentious in New York State because a good number of the publishers operated out of Gotham. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Winters vs. New York, struck down as unconstitutional a state law prohibiting the publication and/or distribution of material “principally made up of criminal news, police reports, or accounts of criminal deeds, or pictures, or stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust or crime.”
In ’48, book burnings took place in New York, West Virginia and Illinois. In October, students at the Spencer Graded School, in the small town of Spencer, WV, encouraged by parents, teachers and religious leaders, collected a 6-ft pile of comic books and set them ablaze in the school yard. With an irony lost on no one, a Superman comic was first ignited and then used to set the pile afire.
In late-53, the U.S. Senate established a special subcommittee to investigate juvenile delinquency. As part of its efforts, it held public and private hearings in Washington, DC, Boston, Denver and Philadelphia that culminating, in April ’54, in New York. Sen. Estee Kefauver (D-TN), an ambitious politician, was a member of the subcommittee who believed that “obscene” media came in all forms and contributed of the rise of youth crime. However, he singled out comic books, especially those labeled crime and horror, for promoting violence.
The principal target of Kefauver campaign was Mad magazine published by Bill Gaines. Introduced in ’52, it was billed as “Tales calculated to drive you MAD? Humor in a Jugular Vein.” It initially adhered to the 32-page comic-book convention, offering four stories that parodied other comics and sold for 10¢. In ‘55 it was renamed Mad Magazine, reconfigured it into a conventional black-and-white publication and offered bimonthly at 25¢. And, like other comics, it did not depend on advertising.
Mad was radical not in an ideological or conventional leftist sense, but subversive in that nothing was above critical exposure and mockery. As Nathan Abrams noted, the magazine’s “consistent inconsistency ran counter to the dynamics that formed the New York intellectual community, which were clearly aligned on ideological and political grounds.”
Abrams adds, “Neither did Mad offer any affirmations or alternatives to the American way of life that it held in such contempt. Thus, in its failure to affirm or support anything, Mad possibly deserved the title of ‘dissent’ more than Dissent magazine itself.” He found Mad more radical than contemporary “progressive” publications like Commentary, Partisan Review or The New Leader.
The anti-comics climate heated up in 1954 and ’55 with more than a dozen states either considering or enacting legislature to regulate or suppress comic books. Among those states were California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
In ‘54, the New York state legislature held hearings on juvenile delinquency. The state Assembly and Senate passed a number of bills to restrict comics, but Governor Thomas Dewey vetoed them on constitutional grounds. However, in ’55, the new governor, Averill Harriman, approved what was dubbed the “Fitzpatrick Act,” restricting comics.
Today, a half-century-plus later, the pornography market is estimated to be a $13 billion business and many within the Christian right are seeking to suppress porn especially online porn viewed by what is often referred to as “minors.” In 2023, about 68 percent of U.S. adolescents viewed online pornography. A 2022 survey of more than 1,300 teens (age 13 to 17) found that about 3 out of 4 teens reported that they had viewed online porn either accidentally or on purpose.
In June 2023, Texas adopted the “Online Age Verification Law” (HB 1181) that requires online content providers to implement effective age verification methods to ensure that only adults can access age-restricted content or purchase age-restricted products.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled, in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, that Texas’ adult-content age-verification law was legal. In the wake of the Fifth Circuit ruling, Pornhub, the most trafficked porn website, blocked access in sixteen states, including Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, Arkansas, Utah, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana.
In January 2025, the Supreme Court heard testimony on Texas’s age-verification law, a law that has been adopted by 23 other states. Comments by Court Justices are suggestive of what might be coming with a formal decision:
“Chief Justice John Roberts: ‘Technological access to pornography, obviously, has exploded, right? … It was very difficult for 15-year-olds to get access to the type of things that are available with a push of a button today. And the nature of the pornography, I think, has also changed.’
“Justice Amy Coney Barrett: ‘Kids can get online porn through gaming systems, tablets, phones, computers. Let me just say that content-filtering for all those different 25 devices, I can say from personal experience, is difficult to keep up with. I think that the explosion of addiction to online porn has shown that content-filtering isn’t working.’
“Justice Clarence Thomas: ‘Assuming we agree with you [Texas], and I think most people do, that kids are to be protected, how much of a burden is permissible on adults’ First Amendment rights?'”
The Justices’s approach to pornography is suggestive by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that insists:
“Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. (p. 5)”
To subvert the age-verification laws, there’s been an explosive uptick in VPN [Virtual Private Network] usage. For example, there’s been a 150 percent increase in VPN demand in Florida, 967 percent in Utah and 234.8 percent in Texas.
So, round #2 of the porn wars are taking shape. While initially targeting “minors,” conservatives will likely broaden their targets to include other aspects of the internet or streaming services. In this way, it will undercut Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Act pushing enforcement of what is identified as “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”