OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma Senator Dusty Deevers has introduced a bill that would criminalize all adult content and authorize the state to imprison those who create or view it.
Under SB 593, which Deevers asserts will “restore moral sanity” to Oklahoma, anyone who produces, distributes, or even possesses porn in Oklahoma would face up to 10 years in prison.
“Pornography is both degenerate material and a highly addictive drug,” Deevers said in a statement announcing the bills. “It ruins marriages, ruins lives, destroys innocence, warps young people’s perception of the opposite sex, turns women into objects, turns men into objects, degrades human dignity, and corrodes the moral fabric of society. Any decent society will stand against this plague with the full weight of the law.”
In addition to serving in the state legislature, Deevers is a pastor at Grace Reformed Baptist Church in Elgin, Oklahoma. He unsuccessfully proposed similar legislation last year.
Oklahoma already has an age verification law on the books, which led Pornhub to block access in the state. The fate of that law may be decided when the Supreme Court rules in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the pending case challenging Texas’ controversial age verification law, HB 1181. However, a total ban such as Deevers proposes would challenge long-established jurisprudence recognizing adult content as protected speech under the First Amendment.
Industry attorney Corey Silverstein called the bill “blatantly unconstitutional.”
“Oklahoma’s SB 593 is one of the most ridiculous proposed anti-pornography laws that I’ve ever seen,” he told XBIZ. “It appears that Sen. Deevers is more interested in making news headlines and trying to keep his conservative constituents happy than creating legislation that would survive a constitutional challenge.”
Mike Stabile, Director of Public Policy at Free Speech Coalition, also scoffed at the profound overreach of Deevers’ proposed legislation.
“Just to make this incredibly clear, under Sen. Deevers’ bill, you could go to jail for a year for having an old copy of Playboy,” said Stabile. “Sen. Deevers is welcome to choose what books he might read and what movies he might see — he does not have the right to inspect the bookshelves and phones of Oklahomans for legal material he finds morally objectionable.”
Stabile added that the bill is, unfortunately, “not an anomaly.”
“Politicians on the right have been quite explicit about their desire to ban sexual content, even when it’s privately viewed by adults in their own homes,” said Stabile. “Over the past few years, we’ve seen lightly disguised ‘age verification’ bills used to effectively ban access to adult content in many Southern states. We’re seeing loud calls for the new administration to use the Department of Justice to arrest alleged ‘pornographers’ — a designation increasingly applied to not just adult content creators, but writers, artists, and educators. Porn is the canary in the coal mine of free speech, and the trial balloon used by governments to pass laws that can censor speech more broadly. No matter how people feel about adult content, we should all be concerned about the proposed government crackdown on speech.”
Deevers’ attack on the adult industry is more overt and blatant than anything yet seen at the federal level. During the 2024 election campaign, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy blueprint, “Mandate for Leadership,” included a call to criminalize all adult content, asserting that pornography “has no claim to First Amendment protection.”
“Pornography should be outlawed,” the document states. “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”
President Trump eventually tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but has since appointed Brendan Carr, who contributed to that policy document, as chair of the Federal Communications Commission.
