The final victory of pornography in the United States lies not in the ubiquity of hardcore porn on every phone but rather the extent to which society tolerates it. We have laws against obscenity on the books in every state and at the federal level. But prosecutors everywhere find excuses not to bring obscenity charges.
They cite First Amendment concerns. They worry about shifting community standards. They plead limited resources. It’s always someone else’s job to enforce the laws — feds wait for the states, states wait for the counties, counties for the cops.
These excuses show that there is no longer honor in fighting porn, nor is there societal shame for producing pornography. This reallocation of honor and shame marks the sexual revolution’s deepest success.
Our new Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, “Is General Obscenity Still Illegal? A Postmortem on the Bush Obscenity Prosecution Task Force,” reveals this cultural shift by investigating the last serious federal effort to prosecute pornographers. Launched in 2005, the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force (OPTF) under Director Brent Ward achieved convictions in every case it tried.
Yet, as we show, the OPTF effort was doomed from the start. Ward’s 2007 resignation memorandum to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, published for the first time with the Backgrounder, reveals an operation “calibrated so as to render obscenity enforcement only minimally effective.”
Organizational flaws abounded: chronic under-resourcing, FBI content guidelines that created a safe harbor for most pornography, too few investigators, a strange geographic separation between investigators and prosecutors, and a Task Force that depended on voluntary participation from U.S. Attorneys who often declined cases or dragged their feet.
As Ward explained when we interviewed him, lawyers and agents recoiled from the work of prosecuting obscenity. “The material is just so offensive that people do not want to deal with it,” he noted. They did not want to immerse themselves in it, present it to juries, or risk being seen as prudish scolds by condemning it in elite legal circles. Judges did not want clerks to watch the videos. No one wanted to wear what Ward called “the Scarlet A of Anti-Free Speech.” Fighting obscenity brought little professional honor and carried great reputational risk. Defending public morality against pornography had become dishonorable.
This inversion of honor is the sexual revolution’s lasting triumph. By framing sexual liberation as synonymous with personal freedom and progress, the revolution recast traditional moral restraints — chastity, fidelity, modesty — as old-fashioned and oppressive — even as a bit too Christian and Bible-thumpy. The unwillingness to regulate obscenity is a hallmark of a world hostile to a public role for Christian belief.
Once “respectable” people concluded that consenting adults could please themselves without interference, enforcing obscenity laws came to be seen as backward interference in private choices. Complaining about porn would be as bad as complaining about same-sex marriage.
Supreme Court decisions like Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and the Court’s hostility to early internet child-protection measures during the early 2000s reinforced the sense that government had no business policing private choices. And for any concerns that remained, techno-optimists assured us that filters and markets would suffice for those personally opposed to porn. Elite institutions embraced the new dispensation.
Only a restoration of true honor will make obscenity regulation possible. The time for such a re-reversal is now.
A shift away from indulgence to obscenity seems more achievable now than at any other time in this millennium. The modern culture of porn on demand has revealed the very problems obscenity laws were designed to prevent. Porn erodes the sexual dance. It fuels addiction-like patterns, distorts expectations, delays family formation, and contributes to relational breakdown and declining fertility. And it shapes appetites in destructive ways, desensitizing users and escalating their emotions, mental patterns, and actions toward greater extremes.
Ward’s postmortem of the OPTF makes clear that the structural problems that belied its success were symptoms, not the disease. The real obstacle is a professional class that views obscenity prosecution as distasteful and dishonorable.
Reversing porn’s societal denigration requires a restored recognition that the defense of a decent sexual order is indeed honorable, as is creating the conditions for male vitality. Revived prosecutorial efforts need resources, clear mandates, and top-level support to overcome bureaucratic inertia. High-value targets — major distributors and platforms hiding behind Section 230 — must face accountability. But none of that will happen without those who recognize that true honor is to be found in protecting their communities from the plague of pornography.
The laws have not changed. The evidence of pornography’s harms has only grown clearer. Can attorneys win honor by bringing down porn platforms and distributors? The sexual revolution’s final victory can only be rolled back when conservatives insist that defending the conditions for healthy families and a decent public square is among the most honorable tasks of law and politics.
