Straight out of Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation, Senator Mike Lee (Idiot-Utah) and Rep. Mary Miller (Idiot-Illinois) have introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act, which Lee claims will ‘clarify’ the legal definition of “obscenity” for all states, making the transmission of obscene content across state lines more easily prosecuted.
Like most Republicans, they have made “their own weird psychosexual issues everyone else’s problem.” If passed, the bill would broadly define pornography to the point that “even the faintest suggestion of sexuality passed around on the internet, whether it be a GIF, a meme, or a freeze-frame of the interrogation scene from Basic Instinct, would be considered criminal smut. This is the second time Lee has introduced the bill.”
While concerns about pornography, including moral and religious ones, are part of any healthy public debate, this bill does something far more dangerous: It empowers the federal government to police speech based on subjective values. When lawmakers try to enforce the beliefs of some Americans at the expense of others’ rights, they cross a constitutional line — and put the First Amendment at risk.
The legislation aims to rewrite the legal definition of obscenity, an area of law that represents a very narrow exception to First Amendment protections (Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 1973). In that SCOTUS case, Chief Justice Warren Burger outlined what he called “guidelines” for jurors in obscenity cases. These guidelines are the three prongs of the Miller test. They are:
(1) whether the average person applying contemporary community standards would find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
(2) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and
(3) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
Senator Mike Lee’s bill would essentially discard ‘community standards’ when determining what is and what is not obscene or pornographic. It would enable the federal government to issue a single national standard that fails to account for regional differences, cultural context or evolving social values.
The bill also deletes the requirement that material be “patently offensive,” a crucial element that keeps the obscenity test anchored in societal consensus. Instead, it replaces it with a subjective inquiry into whether the work was intended to arouse or titillate. But intent is notoriously difficult to prove and easy to allege. That language could easily sweep in a wide range of protected expression, including art, health information and sex education.
