WASHINGTON — Conservative newspaper The Washington Examiner published on Tuesday an op-ed by a religious right academic supporting Project 2025’s proposal to criminalize the production and distribution of adult content, criticizing industry figures’ efforts to bring attention to it, and claiming that pornography constitutes “a social, mental, and spiritual epidemic of high proportions.”
The Washington Examiner article, titled “Project 2025 should accept its pro-pornography critiques as a badge of honor,” was penned by Christian right ideologue Adam Carrington, a clergyman who currently serves as assistant professor of politics at Hillsdale College.
Carrington’s virulently anti-porn op-ed is part of The Washington Examiner’s ultraconservative propaganda series Restoring America, which among other objectives aims to “support policies that foster family formation and parental authority, which promote freedom and resist central control.”
According to Carrington, Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation should wear the opposition of the performer-driven #HandsOffMyPorn movement — launched Monday — with pride because “much more should be done, legally and culturally, to limit, suppress and ostracize the making and consumption of pornography. “
Carrington ignores the multiple testimonials by #HandsOffMyPorn supporters that they are freely choosing the work, because he believes that adult content “degrades the people involved, regardless of why they participate or how they think about their participation.”
Everyone in the adult industry, the conservative academic continues, is “destroying the link between the sexual act and the rest of our humanity. Pornography severs the relational link, wherein sex expresses loving intimacy within the protective confines of stable, healthy marriages. Pornography destroys the procreative link, whereby the act remains open to the creation of the next generation of human beings. Finally, it damages our link to God, disobeying his natural — and revealed — law that orders our lives for our physical, emotional, and spiritual health.”
Carrington also has enormous contempt for people who choose to watch adult content, theorizing that “pornography also degrades the persons consuming it. They participate in the severed links described above that plague participants in this industry. Severing sex from relationships also affects their real-life marriages and friendships. It facilitates treating other human beings as objects to be used for one’s own selfish pleasure.”
Endorsing debunked pseudo-scientifc notions, Carrington claims that “pornography also addicts its watchers to cheap and ugly thrills, fueling fetishes and their ilk.”
Instead, he mandates, “we should be engaging with each other through the long-term contentment of monogamy.”
Even more outlandishly, Carrington goes on to claim that “pornography consumption makes friendship harder as well, for it accentuates the sexualization of everyone and everything.”
The clergyman and professor of politics concludes by claiming that adult content “is a social, mental, and spiritual epidemic of high proportions” before outright calling for the “limiting and suppressing this malicious industry” by the federal government.
Carrington is also the co-director and chaplain at the John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs of Ashland University in Ohio. The center is named after the Ohio politician who was one of the founders of the New Right movement in the 1970s, and who was critical of Richard Nixon as “insufficiently conservative.”
Main Image: Clergyman academic Prof. Adam Carrington