Donald Trump once famously posed for the front cover of Playboy. But this week, he became the first Presidential candidate in history to sign a pledge agreeing to enforce anti-pornography laws once in the Oval Office.
The pledge, created by anti-Internet porn group Enough is Enough, asks candidates to vow to resurrect long-dormant anti-obscenity laws to effectively remove adult entertainment sites from the web in the interest of protecting children from “Internet crimes.”
According to Enough is Enough’s President Donna Rice Huges, porn is a “public health crisis” that should be regulated regardless of the constitutionality of anti-obscenity laws. “Over the last two decades America’s children have paid an unnecessarily steep price for the lax enforcement of federal obscenity laws,” Hughes said in a statement. “Obscenity is not protected under the First Amendment, and the failure to enforce the law is harming children across the nation and around the world.”
She’s not quite right. While obscenity isn’t protected, the Supreme Court has struggled with whether pornography is, itself, obscene. What constitutes obscenity is based on what the court calls a “community standard,” so it changes from environment to environment. So far, the Court has declined to apply strict community standards to adult content on the Internet, preferring to err on the side of free speech.
Trump doesn’t seem to let the edicts of the Constitution dictate the boundaries of his domestic policy. But questions remain as to why a man who has no qualms about displaying his Playboy cover proudly in his New York office, keeps bikini photos of his ex-wife on his desk, and even approved of his wife’s racy photo shoot, would sign his name to a pledge effectively banning all adult entertainment (potentially including his wife’s smoking-hot snaps.)
The answer may be that he needs Utah more than he’s letting on.
Utah is “ground zero” for the anti-porn movement. Utah legislators have pushed for tough anti-porn regulations in both the Utah state legislature and in Congress, using the same rationale as the Enough is Enough pledge: that pornography is a “public health crisis.” Enough is Enough recently applauded Utah legislators’ efforts at taking on adult content.
And for the first time in decades, Utah is a swing state. Utahans are notably skeptical of Trump. They’re turned off by his personal history and his “brash” style, which they say conflicts with Utah’s deep Mormon roots. As a result, Trump came in third in Utah’s primary—and Utah’s support is now evenly split between Trump and Hillary Clinton, with Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson only a few points behind the leaders.
Trump, however, needs Utah not just to win but to maintain the slate of states Mitt Romney won in 2012. Without Utah, Trump’s chances at locking away the Presidency are in serious jeopardy. And so, drastic measures—like an anti-porn pledge—need to be taken.
