How the GOP Gave Up on Porn (Politico)
Read the full article by Tim Alberta at Politico.com
Once, the fight against pornography was the beating heart of the American culture war. Now porn is a ballooning industry — and maybe a harmful one —with no real opponents. What happened?
The Year Was 1976. Republicans were reeling from Watergate. Christian conservatives were defecting to the Democratic Party. And Jerry Falwell, the Virginia preacher with a booming Baptist congregation and a popular radio show, decided he could no longer sit on the sidelines as he saw American culture succumbing to the creeping forces of secularism. The precipitating event was an interview given by Jimmy Carter, in which the Democratic presidential nominee admitted to having “looked on a lot of women with lust,” and “committed adultery in my heart many times.” Carter had never acted on such temptation, he implied, but the admission kept him humble: “Christ says, don’t consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife.”
The doctrine itself was not objectionable. But the language—and more crucially, the venue—was intolerable for Falwell. The interview had run in Playboy magazine, alongside nude photographs of Miss November and articles such as “The Vatican Sex Manual” and “Prurient Puritans.” In his televised Sunday sermons, Falwell began railing against Carter’s courtship of the randy men’s magazine and its 5 million readers. When Carter’s team tried to block one of his antagonistic sermons from being broadcast shortly before Election Day, claiming it violated the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, Falwell raised the stakes. He assembled a group of leading fundamentalist ministers at the National Press Club in Washington and accused Carter of “muzzling a preacher of the gospel from preaching his moral convictions.” The press conference, which cemented Falwell’s status as an ascendant political heavyweight, would be looked back on as the inception of the Moral Majority.
It was the height of the porn wars. More than abortion or homosexuality, the rising tide of pornography in America was, in the 1970s, becoming central to conservative Americans’ perception of a civilization in decline. For faith leaders, it was an easily exploitable issue; for Falwell, it was a crusade. He fought to remove adult content from convenience stores. He went to court to battle Hustler and Penthouse. And he never forgave Carter—who ended up winning the White House in 1976, carrying the evangelical vote along the way—for his original sin of talking to Hugh Hefner’s publication. “Giving an interview to Playboy magazine was lending the credence and the dignity of the highest office in the land to a salacious, vulgar magazine that did not even deserve the time of his day,” Falwell said in 1981.
Forty years after that D.C. press conference, a very different scene unfolded. This one took place in New York and starred Jerry Falwell Jr., inheritor of the family business. Hours earlier, the younger Falwell had introduced the GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump to a massive gathering of Christian leaders, calling him “God’s man,” anointed to lead the nation in turbulent times. The summit was successful beyond anyone’s expectation. As they celebrated back at Trump Tower, Falwell sought to document the occasion with a photo. The future president stood in the middle, flanked by Falwell Jr. and his wife, Becki. Thumbs went up. The camera snapped. Falwell tweeted the photo to his 60,000 followers. There was just one hiccup: Lurking over Becki Falwell’s left shoulder, framed in gold, was a cover of Playboy, graced by a bow-tied Trump and a smiling brunette covered only by his tuxedo jacket.
The photo sparked a frenzy. Nothing, it seemed, could so neatly encapsulate the religious right’s backsliding as Falwell Jr. giving a thumbs-up in front of the very magazine his father had singled out as symbolic of America’s moral decay—while standing shoulder to shoulder with a man who had appeared in a softcore porno flick and who reportedly, as Jimmy Carter might have put it, screwed a bunch of women outside of marriage, including a Playboy model and hardcore adult-film actress.
And it highlighted something else just as striking: the total abandonment of pornography as a battleground in America’s culture war. Tim Alberta is chief political correspondent for POLITICO Magazine, covering Donald Trump’s presidency, Capitol Hill, the ideological warfare between and within the two parties, demographic change in America, and the evolving role of money in elections.