Pornography is the canary in the coalmine of protected speech. When you give a group the ability to censor content on the basis of "obscenity", then that group and other groups can use this to label other subjects they don't like as obscene. LGBTQ+ interest topics are especially vulnerable to this, as it is often made the case that being gay or trans is only about sex. You don't have to consume pornography yourself in order to benefit from a society that allows it.

> LGBTQ+ interest topics are especially vulnerable to this,

Exactly, the Heritage Foundation doesn't define porn the same way a reasonable person might. From Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership: "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children".

Yeah it's easy to see that Heritage would just ban Celeste, or any allegory about LGBT existence.

I don't think LBGTQ+ are too harmed by the removal of "Sex adventures Incest Family" or "Interactive Sex Mother Son Incest BDSM" or "Reincarnation adventure going to rape all NPCS VR" front he steam store. I don't think too many LGBTQ like to include rapists or incest adventures into their group. I could be wrong though.

I agree with you in that most LGBTQ+ folks don't like being grouped in with incest-promoting games, but that's exactly what MasterCard and Visa are doing by forcing platforms to indiscriminately remove adult content.

It should be up to individual platforms to moderate this content on a case by case basis, not the payment processors.

It doesn’t matter how much entirely non-porn queer content there is. The folks behind the payment processor pressure campaigns view Heartstopper and Pride Puppy! as just as immoral and depraved as the stuff you mentioned.

Strictly speaking this isn't a conventional free speech issue since the government isn't involved here, just private businesses.

That said, there's a de facto duopoly on payment processing that gives these companies near government-level power to dictate terms. Realistic alternatives don't exist and would be insanely hard to start.

>My free speech red line is criticism of govt and leaders.

Doesn't sound like you support free speech at all then if this is your red line. Criticism of politicians is needed to keep them in line. Being about to criticize the US government is true freedom.

That's already happening though. There's a bunch of quid pro quo for speech curtailment in the media right now. Hell, just this week Colbert lost his spot to appease the administration for the Paramount + Skydance merger. Even if it's not direct to the little guys and it's just quid-pro-quo, it's just them being smart enough to make it seem more palatable. It's the same thing.

Since when has protected speech required being valuable? And who made you the pronouncer of said value?

> Since when has protected speech required being valuable?

For this specific topic in the US, it's necessary. The third prong of the Miller Test is "Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

The three-pronged Miller test is for examining if something is obscene, which is a considerably narrower criteria than whether or not a given piece of free speech is worthy of protection. Speech does not need to be 'valuable' to be worthy of protection, it needs to have a specific lack of value as determined by the Miller test to not be protected. Big difference.

Text is fairly comparable with speech, so it's be reasonable to argue that a pornographic novel is 'speech'.

Not so sure about 4K video footage, though. Or videogames. That's more a 'freedom of art' issue.

In what world is artistic expression not free speech? Just because you don't like it doesn't mean its not protected.

> Ban all the porn games ya want, I don't think they're very valuable.

Ban all the games, I don't think videogames are very valuable.

Ban all TV shows, I don't think TV shows are very valuable.

Ban all televised sports, I think sports are very boring and not very valuable.

In fact, ban all the things I don't particularly find valuable.

>When did pornography become protected speech?

A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney General of Massachusetts, 1966 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=101895573599950...)

Miller v. California, 1973 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=287180442152313...)

Jenkins v. Georgia, 1974 (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=106399862265120...)

-- https://reason.com/2019/10/04/pornography-is-protected-by-th...