scornography

Sen. Mike Lee wants to make it illegal for you to swap nudes with guys across state lines

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Sen. Mike Lee of Utah speaking into a microphone

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah has chosen the hill he would like to die on, and it’s one covered in sweat, sin, and other bodily fluids.

The 51-year-old, who hates LGBTQ people, just proposed two new pieces of legislation. The first bill, which he’s calling the “Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN)”, would require adult websites to ask users their age before allowing them access to any content.

Related: J.D. Vance wants to outlaw adult entertainment instead of assault weapons and the jokes write themselves

“Given the alarming rate of teenage exposure to pornography, I believe the government must act quickly to enact protections that have a real chance of surviving First Amendment scrutiny. We require age verification at brick-and-mortar shops. Why shouldn’t we require it online?” Lee said in a statement.

Of course, any millennial who grew up cruising on sites like gay.com as a closeted teenager knows how to get around that filter.

Lee’s second piece of legislation, dubbed the “Interstate Obscenity Definition Act”, is even dumber. It aims to effectively make his first piece of legislation moot by banning pornograhy, er, “sexually explicit content” from the internet entirely.

The bill aims to do so by establishing a national definition of “obscenity” that could then be used to prevent porn from being shared across state lines. Lee, who voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, hopes to define “obscenity” as vaguely as possible to include virtually anything:

(1) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; (2) the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

In other words, he wants to kill the porn industry and make it so you can’t share nudes with that hot dude three states away who you’ve been chatting with on Grindr.

Mike Sabile of the Free Speech Coalition recently told Vice News that the backlash against sexual content, including sex ed in schools, is just another push by right wingnuts to censor anything and everything they can in response to same-sex marriage signed into federal law by President Biden and LGBTQ people becoming more visible in pop culture and society as a whole.

“We are in a very reactionary cultural moment,” he explained. “I spend a lot of time in anti-porn and anti-sex work forums, monitoring what’s going on in terms of those conversations, and there is obviously a rise in panic around things like pornography and sex education in schools.”

“I think we have to see this as part of a broader push to really censor speech about sex.”

But Lee, a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, insists this is all about protecting the children.

“Every day, we’re learning more about the negative psychological effects pornography has on minors,” he said in a statement.

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