
Arizona State Rep. Michelle Udall, R-Mesa, introduced a resolution declaring "pornography is a crisis leading to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts."
Several other states, Utah being the first, natch, have declared porn a public health crisis, and it was a plank in the 2016 Republican party platform, which you might have missed because the part where the platform said we ought to give the Ukraine back to Russia got all the publicity, but it was there.
The best way to react to the Arizona resolution is to shrug indifferently, and to remind yourself of the guiding principal of today’s political wars—anytime Republicans use a phrase that ends in “crisis,” you can be certain it is no big deal.
“Pornography is used pervasively, even by minors,” says Udall, which inspires a great big, “Well, duh,” on my part. Minors, especially minor boys, are the ones most desperately in need of porn, because onanism, or to use the scientific term, slapping the bishop, is an important daily activity in their young lives, one they engage in far more frequently than brushing their teeth and changing their underwear, because no teenage boy changes his underwear four times a day, unless he is a particularly clumsy masturbator.
Young men with mental health issues do not burst into schools, churches and movie theaters and start spraying porn at innocents. Immigrant caravans are not thronging the border because they can’t log on to PornHub from Guatemala. The electronic buzz of porn on tablets and cell phones probably contributes to global warming, but no more than the Fox News does by being on the TV in the waiting room of every fucking lube shop in the country. Seriously, the longer you can go between oil changes, the less Fox you have to watch.
Fortunately, for all of you porn stars and fans out there, the resolution does nothing to ban porn in Arizona. There will be no Sheriff Joe of porn, watching through the dust-caked windows of that arid state, making sure its citizens are not running up their credit card debt on cam girls. Stormy Daniels will not be forced to put on a white coat and go to work at a CVS in Nogales. Trump will still be able to download all the Arizona porn his mushroom craves when he visits Mar al Lago.
Which he has to do, because he is not allowed to view porn in the White House.
Probably the only place in the country you can’t get the stuff.