Rick Santorum Invents His Own Facts to Justify Banning Porn

Last updated on April 7th, 2012 at 11:57 pm

Rick Santorum is not only doubling down on his promise to ban porn, but he is making up his own facts to support his plan to suppress the First Amendment.

Here is the video from ABC News:

Transcript from This Week:

KARL: Your stance on pornography has also gotten a lot of attention this week. I want to read something — this is from your website. You say, “America is suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography. It causes profound brain changes in both children and adults, resulting in widespread negative consequences.” What did you mean by that?

SANTORUM: Well, you know, we do something rather unusual in our campaign. When people write into our campaign and ask for our opinions on issues, we actually respond to them and post them up on the website, and that’s what happened here. And someone was asking about the fact that President Obama and his attorney general don’t enforce the existing pornography laws. And we wrote back and put it up on our web site saying that we would, of course, as president enforce those laws, because obviously Congress in its wisdom understood that hard-core pornography is very damaging, particularly to young people, and that exposure on the Internet can be very damaging, and of course it’s very damaging to a lot of folks who–

KARL: So what do you do about it, though?

SANTORUM: — are in all sorts of settings (ph). You enforce the law. There are laws against purveying hard-core pornography. And that — we have attorney generals in the country, at least under the Bush administration, who did prosecute that. And this administration isn’t. And I simply said I would follow the law, which I know in the case of Barack Obama can be somewhat of a hefty challenge for him, but we’re going to do it as president.

Santorum’s defense of his position that he would ban the distribution of porn is based on the false premise that he would just be enforcing the existing laws that are on the books. The cries of enforce the law are nothing more than social conservative code for a ban. Rick Santorum’s claim that the Bush administration carried out similar prosecutions to what he is proposing is an outright lie. What Santorum is proposing is a ban on the distribution of everything that his administration labels hardcore pornography.

Forbes pointed out that this is not what the Bush Administration did, “I would note that this is very different from what the Bush Administration did. The Bush DOJ did establish an Obscenity Prosecution Task Force in 2005, but this body focused on bringing prosecutions against small-time producers who made porn with extreme content. (Even so, it faced significant pushback from U.S. Attorneys, some of whom viewed such prosecutions as a distraction and a misuse of resources.) Many social conservative groups were disappointed with the task force, contending that more mainstream hardcore porn violates obscenity laws, and they urged the Bush Administration to bring obscenity cases against major producers.”

Santorum is publicly promising to follow in the footsteps of George W. Bush, but his actual plan is to declare a full scale war on the distribution of pornography. What Rick Santorum isn’t telling anyone is that the right wing group pushing for a ban on porn sees no distinction between hardcore and soft core porn. In their view, the distribution of all pornography is illegal. They are trying to get around the porn industry’s First Amendment rights by banning the distribution instead of the content itself.

Rick Santorum knows that his extremist positions make him unelectable, but instead of moving towards the middle, the Santorum campaign has constructed an elaborate web of lies to hide their true intentions.

The truth is that Rick Santorum not only wants to be ban porn. He wants to use the powers of the federal government, and tax payer funds to legislate morality. This simple fact is why Rick Santorum will never be elected President of the United States.

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Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

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Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association

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