AUSTIN — The leader of the American Principles Project (APP), a well-funded anti-porn conservative lobby that calls itself “the NRA for Families,” claimed last week during a Fox News interview that his group is behind the porn age verification laws passed by seven states, and admitted they were experiments so that the next Republican U.S. attorney general can prosecute anyone uploading adult content that could be seen by a minor.
“We’d really like to get Florida done. We’d like to do something in Georgia. Ohio would be great. We’ve got it done in seven states right now. So, we have 43 more to go,” the APP’s Terry Schilling told Fox News.
As XBIZ reported, Schilling had bragged in early 2022 that his group was also behind the current Republican-led book-banning movement, and that his goal was to purge “pornography” from libraries.
Speaking about the state-by-state effort to pass age verification laws — most of which stem from the Louisiana model which went into effect on Jan. 1 — Shilling told Fox that Texas “was the crown jewel” for his movement.
“It was the biggest state that we had,” Schilling enthused, adding that his organization had “started working and building a coalition several years ago” to accomplish that goal.
Schilling added that for proponents of state censorship of adult material, the real issue is that current anti-obscenity laws at the federal level are not been enforced.
“So what we wanted to do was build momentum at the state level, show that it can be done, use the laboratories of democracy, and then build up momentum to get the next attorney general of the United States to actually enforce these laws and require these companies to verify that these are actually adults, not children, that are viewing this obscene material,” Schilling told Fox.
Schilling: Censoring Porn Will Make People ‘Happier’
The second-generation conservative activist — the son of the late religious conservative Illinois and Iowa politician Bobby Schilling — dismissed Pornhub’s blocking of its platform in the states that had passed vaguely worded age verification mandates.
“What they’re betting on is that they’ll be able to create such an uproar by people that watch porn,” Schilling theorized. “They’re making the wrong bet because what’s going to end up happening is these people that can’t get access to porn, they’re going to be a lot happier, and they’re going to realize that this was something that was not that great in their life and move on and hopefully find a partner and a spouse to be intimate with instead of a computer screen.”
Schilling’s American Principles Project has a lower profile than older crusading anti-porn outfits such as NCOSE — formerly Morality in Media — or Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, or louder upstarts such as Exodus Cry and the related endeavors of its mouthpiece Laila Mickelwait. However, the APP has been wielding its checkbook power in several electoral races, with a related super PAC that has spent millions on recent efforts to elect candidates who support its social and cultural agenda.
In 2021, congressional news site The Hill reported that the American Principles Project was rolling out a membership program known as “APP’s Big Family,” which the organization dubbed an “NRA for families.”
Throughout interviews and in his literature, Schilling relentlessly claims to speak for all “families,” which he thinks hold views identical to those of himself and his organization’s membership.
The group’s hope, Schilling told The Hill, was “to replicate the NRA’s vast membership base.”
Schilling suggested copying the NRA’s model of rallying “an activist army of people across the country” around culture war issues.
A Conservative Preoccupied With Porn and ‘Butt-Sex’
In April 2020, Schilling penned an anti-porn op-ed for The American Conservative magazine, claiming that since Nicholas Kristof’s article for The New York Times, “The Children of Pornhub,” there had been “a growing chorus of leaders calling for an increasingly out-of-control porn industry to finally be held accountable. And as more evidence comes in, it could not be clearer that porn use is indeed out of control.”
During the 2020 election cycle, Schilling advocated granting more power to the Department of Justice through “more powerful porn laws” that he wanted Congress to pass, and revealed that “behind the scenes, several conservative groups, including my own, the American Principles Project, have actively pushed DOJ” to revive 20th-century-style obscenity prosecutions to target adult content online.
The same year, Schilling was the subject of a controversy over his tweets from 2019 — which he since deleted — stating his views on LGBTQ Americans.
“I have zero problem explaining heterosexual sex to my kids if they ask — it’s how babies are made. Am I really a snowflake for not wanting to explain butt sex to my kids?” Schilling wrote. “‘Dad, can two dads have kids together? Why do they get married? How do they have kids?’”
“Yes, two dads can get married and can have kids, but they have to hire a woman to implant an embryo in her uterus and carry the baby to term, then the two dads take the baby away from the mom, just like a puppy,” he added.
“Is this the conversation I should have with my kids?” Schilling continued in a social media tirade that revealed his granular preoccupation with the love lives of others.
Main Image: American Principles Project’s Terry Schilling