The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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PHOENIX — There’s something jarring about waking up to the idea that an entire category of human expression could suddenly become illegal. Not regulated. Not filtered. Not nudged behind another age-gate wall. Just… gone. That’s the direction Arizona may be staring down after a member of the state House introduced a bill Wednesday that would make it illegal to produce or distribute adult content anywhere in the state.
Republican Rep. Khyl Powell’s HB 2900 would impose civil penalties for producing, publishing, selling, offering for sale, or commercially distributing pornography in Arizona, including via websites or digital services. It’s written in that broad, sweeping legislative language that always makes me pause — the kind that doesn’t just touch the margins, but tries to redraw the whole map.
The bill allows for civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation, or per day in violation of the law. While the bill assigns enforcement to the state attorney general, it also allows private individuals to pursue civil action “in the name of” Arizona, in cases where the attorney general does not do so first. That little clause is the one that tends to keep lawyers up at night — the quiet invitation for citizens to become enforcers, neighbors to become watchdogs, and courtrooms to become battlegrounds.
Arizona already has an age verification law on the books, which took effect Sept. 26. But a total ban? That’s a different animal entirely. It bumps straight into long-standing legal precedent recognizing adult content as protected speech under the First Amendment. You can almost hear the constitutional gears grinding as soon as the idea hits the page.
Still, the push to ban adult content hasn’t come out of nowhere. Over the past year, it’s been popping up like political whack-a-mole across the country. In January 2025, an Oklahoma state senator introduced a bill that would criminalize all adult content and authorize the state to imprison those who create or even view it. In May, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah rolled out federal legislation aimed at redefining nearly all visual depictions of sex as obscene and therefore illegal — a goal also laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy blueprint, which has heavily guided the Trump administration’s agenda. Then in September, Michigan lawmakers floated a bill that would ban distributing pornography online in that state and require internet service providers to install filtering technology to block access for residents. It starts to feel less like coincidence and more like a coordinated drumbeat.
So far, though, reality has had a way of slowing the march. All three of those proposals appear to have stalled in their respective legislatures. HB 2900 has now been referred to the Arizona House Commerce and Rules committees, where it will either gather momentum — or quietly fade into the familiar legislative limbo. Either way, the bigger question lingers in the air: how far can lawmakers push before the Constitution pushes back? Sometimes the laws we propose say just as much about our fears as they do about our values.
