To some of us, the unholy marriage of the Democratic Party and the pornography industry may seem like an obvious one, almost an inevitability, but it was still “newsworthy” that a coalition of pornography producers, distributors, and “performers” officially launched an online ad campaign urging porn-watchers to vote for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
The $100,000 ad campaign is based on the fear that former President Donald Trump — according to The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a program which Trump has repeatedly disavowed — might ban pornography and jail porn producers if he were returned to office. The ads label Trump and his supporters “weirdos” for even considering outlawing pornography — as if sitting alone in the dark watching other people pretend to have sex were somehow a normal activity. The only surprising thing about this bit of news is that the porn industry isn’t more heavily involved in pro-Democrat politics. Why? Because porn is the twin sibling of the Democratic Party’s favorite policy plank.
The Democratic Party once espoused and championed a number of appealing policies and principles, from supporting the working class to protecting consumers from corporate corner-cutting. But especially over the past several years, nearly every position that once earned the party the respect and even loyalty of American citizens has been jettisoned or forgotten, replaced with the party’s singular master-passion: abortion.
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Since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its disastrous Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, the Democratic Party has increasingly made abortion activism a key tenet of its platform. Initially, there was some opposition to abortion even within the party, largely led by its then-strong Catholic wing, but pro-life voices were ignored and eventually silenced over the decades and the Democratic Party’s abortion position went from “safe, legal, and rare,” as coined by then-President Bill Clinton in 1992, to anytime, anywhere, for any reason, and all on the taxpayer’s dime.
Now, in the just-over-two-years since Trump’s Supreme Court appointees reversed Roe, Harris is essentially running on a platform comprised entirely of abortion. She is unable to coherently articulate policy positions on the economy (although she assures us that she has a plan, as evinced by the oft-repeated claim that she grew up in a middle-class family) and largely avoids the hot-button issue of immigration, which has become an unmitigated crisis under her tenure in the Executive Branch, threatening the very existence of the American nation. But she travels the country to deliver lectures on the necessity of abortion, makes appearances on sex podcasts to discuss “reproductive rights,” and shamelessly visits abortion facilities, where unborn children are brutally eviscerated in the name of what Harris calls “freedom.”
What’s diabolically ironic about Harris and her ilk calling abortion “reproductive rights” or “reproductive freedom” is the inherent admission that sex and pregnancy are reproductive. No, it’s not a “clump of cells,” no it’s not some “fetus” of undefined species, it is a human being reproduced. One would think that, after thousands of years of human beings having sex and making babies, it would be obvious by now that the two go together.
If that were not the case, human history would have ended perhaps thousands of years ago. The Greeks and Romans of old may have asked Demeter or Ceres for a bountiful harvest, but they knew that they had to go out into the fields and till the earth. The Norse may have asked Odin or Thor for victory in combat, but they knew that they had to take up their swords and shields. The Egyptians may have asked Thoth to bless their writing, but they knew that they had to take up pen and ink and papyrus themselves. Just so, all knew that even if they prayed to their respective gods for fertility or a large family, they had to have sex first. This is where pornography and abortion intersect.
Porn may not be a phenomenon unique to the 21st century — one of the earliest cited examples of possible pornography, an illustrated Egyptian scroll, dates from roughly 1,100 years before the birth of Christ — but the advent of the internet has made it almost inescapable, and the ready availability of photo and video technology has opened the floodgates to depictions of more and more depraved and explicit material. Now, practically every cell phone and every laptop has access to pornography. No scrolls need be purchased, no seedy shops need be visited, no magazines stockpiled in shoeboxes under beds: millions of ultra-HD videos are available at the mere click of a button.
One of the chief effects — if not purposes — of pornography is the separation of sexual pleasure from the sexual act. Mere masturbation may, of course, yield some degree of sexual pleasure, but what if it were enhanced with graphic visual stimuli? What if one could return to that visual stimuli time and time again, every night, or even several times a day? And what if there were no consequences? No awkward phone call the next morning to explain that, although the sex was great, you’re not really looking for anything serious right now; no walk of shame from one dorm building or one apartment complex to the next, with messy hair and last night’s outfit; and, of course, no chance of getting pregnant or getting someone pregnant. Remember, all this is spread out before you, as Satan spread out “all the kingdoms of the world” (Matthew 4:8) before Christ, all at the click of a button.
Of course, pornography is not consequence-free; that is merely one of its many poisonous promises. Addiction, psychological devastation, social impairment, and (at least in men) porn-induced erectile dysfunction are just a few of the many maladies that accompany porn use, not to mention the damage that pornography use wreaks upon one’s soul. For in separating sexual pleasure from sex itself, and thus from the loving gift of self that God designed sex to be, pornography is marked as unnatural, a mere perversion of the great good crafted and promised by God, an attempt to remake what God has made, but in the image of Hell, not of Heaven.
Pornography is also, inevitably, never enough. Just as masturbation on its own pales in comparison to the stimulating use of pornography, so pornography eventually pales in comparison to real sex. But after years of addiction (nearly three quarters of teens had been exposed to porn before the age of 12 and a majority watched porn regularly, according to a 2023 survey) to this thing which promises no consequences, facing the possibility of “accidentally” bringing a new human life into existence and having to care for this little creature which shares your own DNA seems terrifying. Thus, one of the greatest joys of the sexual act — greater even than the profound spiritual, emotional, and physical union which sex is meant to be, in the context of a committed, lifelong marriage — becomes a terror, a source of dread.
And thus pornography is revealed as the incestuous twin of the Democratic Party’s chief policy commitment: abortion. While abortion, in its malice and violence, promises the pleasure of sex without the resulting child and contingent responsibility, pornography promises the pleasure of sex without even another human being present. The one is hard and cruel, an insurgent slaughtering those whose rightful home is the womb, while its twin is lethargic and apathetic, sterilizing the sexual act and removing the one component needed to possibly bring a child into the world: someone else.
At their root, both pornography and abortion share the same view of sex, a supremely selfish one: this is no act of love, of freely giving oneself in complete surrender to the beloved, but an act rather of consuming, of the ravenous sexual appetite being fed yet another meal. And that sexual appetite, gluttonously fed and obeyed at every turn, will become the dominating force in one’s life, will not be denied, and will not be tamed. No child will be permitted to infringe on the sexual appetite’s constant feasting. Abortion kills the child. Pornography ensures that there never will be a child in the first place. The two vices are, to borrow the words of William Shakespeare, “two yoke-devils sworn to either’s purpose, Working so grossly in a natural cause That admiration did not whoop at them.”
The evil of both abortion and pornography stems from the fact that each rejects the design of God, each hubristically declares the self to be a higher authority than God, each declares the self to be God. Of course, God’s design for sex necessitates openness to children, achieved through the giving of oneself to another in that sexual act. Abortion rejects God’s plan by removing the child: sex is degraded, from a gift of both body and soul to simply using the other person, and any child which may result will be slain. Pornography rejects God’s plan by removing the necessary two-ness of sex: masturbation before a digital altar replaces the gift of self and thwarts the conception of a child.
It only makes sense for the pornography industry to be openly campaigning for the Democratic Party, the champion of pornography’s violent twin.
LifeNews Note: S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
