Project 2025 will outlaw porn…and call transgender people pornographic
The Heritage Foundation wants to use porn as an excuse to destroy our First Amendment rights.
“Pornography should be outlawed,” writes Heritage Foundation leader Kevin D. Roberts in the foreword to Project 2025. People have many opinions about porn. Porn can be harmful, or it can be made and viewed without hurting anyone. Porn has the protection of the First Amendment: it falls under our constitutional right to free speech and freedom of the press.
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It’s a big deal when Project 2025 says porn should be “outlawed.” Even if you don’t like porn or don’t think it affects you, you should pay attention to this, because the Heritage Foundation wants to use porn as an excuse to take away our freedom of speech.
What does “freedom of speech” really mean?
Some people think that “freedom of speech” means you should be able to say whatever you what, wherever you want, whenever you want, without losing your job or being criticized, or losing your social-media accounts. But that’s not what it means! Freedom of speech (and freedom of the press) means that it’s legal to say what you want to say, even if other people don’t like it, as long as you are not directly threatening to hurt someone.
Your boss, your friends, your social-media followers, or the owner of the business you’re standing in might not like your opinion, and there might be consequences for that. But you still have your freedom of speech, because the government is leaving you alone. No-one has arrested you. You can find a new job, make new friends, join another social-media platform, and spend money at another business.
Undoing the First Amendment
Project 2025 wants the government to imprison anyone who makes or shares porn, and to shut down “telecommunications and technology firms” who host it (any Internet provider, website, or social-media platform that people use to access anything the Heritage Foundation thinks is pornographic). Porn “has no claim to First Amendment protection,” Kevin Roberts says, because he thinks it’s bad. But that’s not how the First Amendment works. One person or organization cannot decide, based on their own morals, what the First Amendment does or doesn’t protect.
The Heritage Foundation says trans people are pornographic
The Heritage Foundation doesn’t just want to outlaw porn: it wants to outlaw trans people and anyone who supports them.
Kevin Roberts says that porn is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.” Don’t let these big words confuse you.
When he says porn is “manifested today” he means “this is how porn shows up today.” When he says “omnipresent propagation,” what he means is that more and more people are supporting trans folks, and he doesn’t like it. When he says “transgender ideology,” he’s trying to make it seem like trans people are a false, dirty idea instead of living human beings. When he says “Sexualization of children,” what he means is that he thinks it’s bad to recognize a young person’s gender, if they are trans.
So let’s go back and translate. Kevin Roberts is saying that nowadays, we can define porn as anything that supports trans people of any age.
Kevin Roberts needs to stop sexualizing trans people
Trans people of all ages exist, and they need support. Lots of them know they are trans at a young age, just like cisgender kids know whether they’re a boy or a girl. Recognizing someone else’s gender or supporting them while they figure it out has nothing to do with having sex, just like putting pink or blue icing on baby-shower cupcakes is not “sexualizing” the baby.
But Project 2025 claims that transgender people are pornographic just for existing, and that anyone who supports them is spreading pornography. And porn will be illegal. See how that works?
Keep Project 2025 out of our government. Check your voter registration now at Vote.org.
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