Media framing is so revealing. The way editors and publishers choose to cast a story - either through the angle they pursue or even the headline that they write - is one of the most obvious and annoying demonstrations of bias you'll find in journalism. A small group of (usually) left-wing ideologues decide what they think about a given issue, then choose a method to present the issue that will naturally lead others to think the same thing.
A galling example of this journalistic malpractice would be this headline, appearing at Business Insider and replicated verbatim by Yahoo, the Independent, MSN, and others:
The bill being referenced is Oklahoma Senate Bill 1976, a proposed law whose text centers around ending the proliferation of child pornography. Notice how that laudable intent received no mention in the headline. Instead, the editors and publishers thought it would be preferable to focus all their coverage on an additional section of the bill that bans other forms of "unlawful pornography."
Under that category, several lewd and lascivious sex acts are listed, and "visual material" that depicts them is prohibited from production and publication. Notably, married couples are exempted from the law.
The bill's author, State Senator Dusty Deevers, explained his motivation:
For far too long, civil society has conflated liberty for license. These bills are aimed at strengthening the God-instituted bedrock of society, that is, family. A strong, prosperous and flourishing society depends on strong families.
He's not wrong about any of that. In fact, his acknowledgement of the conspicuous difference between liberty and "license" is genius. Pornography isn't free speech. It never has been. Our society's embrace of that false premise is indicative of a crippling moral bankruptcy that has manifested, not surprisingly, the further we have strayed from a collective submission to God's authority.
While leftists, progressives, and secularists sneer at Deevers for his "puritanical piety," they fail to realize (or care) who else they are mocking:
In his first State of the Union speech, [George] Washington stressed this point, emphasizing a view universal among the Founders. The ‘security of a free Constitution,' he said, depends on ‘teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority;…to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness.' (emphasis added)
The Founding Fathers, diverse in many of their beliefs, held universally to the reality that there exists a monumentally profound distinction between liberty and licentiousness - licentiousness being the abuse, not the exercise of, liberty.
The reason Washington and the other architects of our republic thought it so important that the American people be able to delineate between the two was because the abuse of liberty (licentiousness) inevitably results in the growth of government. If people aren't self-restrained in their moral conduct, there must be an outside force to restrain them. But the larger and more powerful an outside restraining force (government) becomes, the more retracted individual liberties and freedoms become.
What Deevers' bill demonstrates is the prescience of Washington's warning.
Oklahoma lawmakers see the abusive, corroding, and corrupting nature of pornography. They note the dissolution of families, the increase in crimes, the appeal to puerile and childish passions it evokes in the citizenry, and they want it purged. Given that our people no longer possess the strength of moral character necessary to reject it themselves, Deevers and company seek to use that outside force of government to do so.
In response, perverts and deviants from DC to Oklahoma City to Hollywood decry the government overreach and mock "small government conservatives" as being hypocrites. What they fail to see, what so many are incapable of seeing, is that permitting pornography's continued expanse under the misguided blanket of "free speech" only ensures the continued growth of government to respond to porn's inevitable, proliferating, ugly consequences.
