Total porn ban proposed by Michigan lawmakers | Hacker News Reader

Total porn ban proposed by Michigan lawmakers

fox2detroit.com

91 pointshealsdata61 comments

In addition to the headline, this bill would also criminalize such popular movies as Hairspray, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Tootsie, for which Dustin Hoffman won a Golden Globe. (And quite obviously a fair bit of music videos and general entertainment industry content would also become illegal.)

>> The bill also includes a section that takes aim at transgender individuals by prohibiting material "that includes a disconnection between biology and gender by an individual of 1 biological sex imitating, depicting, or representing himself or herself to be of the other biological sex."

The government can take my VHS copy of The Nutty Professor from my cold, dead hands. It won an Academy Award!

So, for example, Viola / Cesario in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Who needs great literature? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_(Twelfth_Night)

And regarding "the other biological sex"... It is not at all simple to define biological gender in a such a way that there are only two of them. Genitalia, hormones, and chromosome patterns are far from sufficient. In many cases, the gender assigned at birth is arbitrary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

> It is not at all simple to define biological gender in a such a way that there are only two of them.

It's ridiculously easy to do so, and commonly done .. the catch is that it's not all encompassing enough to cover all human births.

Richard Dawkins frequently weasel words his responses, clearly stating that there are only two reproductive (human) sexes ...

Obviously that doesn't cover all the human biological forms that are birthed, nor even does it cover the stages and ages of common human lives .. but it's easy and gets a lot of play.

So its not easy, because it doesnt cover all cases.

Like yeah, its easy to define all colors in only black and white, if i just ignore all colors that arent black or white.

What are you in for?

Multiple homicide, you?

Watching Mrs doubtfire

*horrified gasps

A bunch of movies off hand that weren't mentioned elsewhere. This doesn't include tv shows, the two I remember off hand are M*A*S*H and The Kids in the Hall.

1999: Hilary Swank won best actress for Boys Don't Cry.

1982: Julie Andrews nominated for Victor/Victoria

1983: Barbara Streisand in Yentl -- before she became the effect.

1996: Robin Williams and Gene Hackman in The Birdcage.

1995: Patrick Swayze in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar

1994: Mignight in the Garden of Good and Evil directed by Clint Eastwood

1992: The Crying Game

1994: The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

  released in 1994 and became an international and critical success. *To Wong Foo* shares certain plot details with *Priscilla*, which also concerns two drag queens and a transgender woman on a road trip who manage to win over the locals of a small town. Despite the similarities, *To Wong Foo* had already been in production by the time *Priscilla* was released.

Every monty python movie and most flying circus episodes.

This is really important to keep top of mind when looking at the various porn bans and age restriction laws. Project 2025 has a section on porn bans where they almost exclusively talk about things like "gender ideology." While people say "well it makes sense that kids shouldn't have access to hardcore porn" the lawmakers are trying to make minors unable to access any content that considers gay and trans people to be valid and valuable members of society.

Yeah sure one thing is banning porn, but then there's this little nugget:

The bill's sponsors are also pushing for violators of the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act to register as sex offenders.

The point is to dehumanize those who oppose them, and putting someone on a sex offender registry, in jail, and hitting them with crippling debt is a sure fire way to do it, even if it’s thrown out in court later.

>> Earlier this year, he said porn and human trafficking were linked, adding that "shutting down the porn industry would be a crushing blow to the human trafficking industry."

I doubt this logic, but open to arguments, as I'm not an expert.

The law of unintended consequences says that people would find other outlets, namely incest and rape. Oh, and human trafficking.

Smart thinking there.

Poor fellow.

> Well, I first became aware of it during the physical act of love.

> Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed.

> Luckily, I was able to interpret these feelings correctly.

> Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred.

> Women sense my power and they seek the life essence.

> I do not avoid women. But I do deny them my essence.

Dr. Strangelove

The guy proposing it is a Christian Nationalist who also wants to ban birth control and have the state teach 6th graders how to use guns. [1]

This is first bill I've seen target (erotic) ASMR. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Schriver

[2] https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billintro...

I wonder... Do those folks take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution? Because that whole thing is unamerican.

They're conservatives, so they dont care about rules and laws. Thats their entire world view: rules are for others, protections are for them.

“There must be two groups, an in-group which laws protect but do not bind, and an out-group which laws bind but do not protect.”

We'll let the normal penalties pull this off the front page, because there are countless laws proposed by activist lawmakers, very few of which ultimately make it into law. HN has always preferred to wait until something is actually passed into law before considering it worthy of front page time here.

You're so unprepared for the emerging political reality in the US it almost looks intentional.

The rest of the internet can cover this stuff just fine. We don't need to let eternally attention-hungry politicians be the reason to drag HN away from its purpose for existing.

What would be the reason to drag HN away from its purpose for existing? If the answer is "nothing" it's a ready-made propaganda outfit.

HN's reason for existing is to discuss "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", and "anything that good hackers would find interesting", and things that involve "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon". It's right there at the start of the guidelines and it's always what we use to judge what content is on topic or off topic. That's been constant from the beginning. It excludes "daily political rage bait" for the important reason that most of the rest of the internet is dominated by that stuff and we think it's important that there's one corner of the internet that isn't quite so dominated by it.

I stand by my first comment here. You are embarrassingly, dangerously unprepared for what is required of you.

We routinely host huge discussions about major political developments, some of which spend all day on the front page then continue to smoulder on for days. We're not avoiding discussion of important topics. We're preserving this place as somewhere that can be a better place to discuss important topics when they emerge. But that means being consistent in our criteria for what qualifies and what doesn't.

It's true that US state legislators propose a lot of whackjob bills that get exploited for headlines and then die. They usually don't have 5 co-sponsors, though, not even out of 110 in a chamber.

The guidelines already state that "most stories about politics" are off topic, "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon". We've had plenty of stories about censorship of adult content lately. Politicians campaigning to censor adult content is nothing new. We don't need to feed their eternal hunger for attention. The rest of the internet can do that just fine. If and when this ever becomes something that meets the HN guidelines, it can have its due attention.

And yet you regularly disable flags for tech-irrelevant current events with limited discussion potential (Hulk Hogan death, Venezuela boat strike, etc.) while keeping flags enabled for comprehensively researched articles like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44816165

I am concerned you do not see your own biases in play.

I've responded to you before about Hulk Hogan, but I'll elaborate further. A celebrity death is both "significant new information" and also not usually worth being on the front page of HN. We turned off the flags on the submission because it's a bit unseemly to have [flagged][dead] tags on an obituary post. We'd do that for any celebrity obituary post we see flagged. But we also let it to drop off very quickly and, with our help, it spent no more than 10 minutes on the front page.

Regarding political posts, there will always be grey areas and different people feeling strongly about whether or not particular posts should or should not be discussed. We're always looking for the test of whether the story of evidence of an "interesting new phenomenon", and whether it's a topic that HN can have a healthy, curious discussion about. Our bias is for HN to be a place for curious discussions rather than rage-filled flamewars, to whatever extent we can influence that.

I think this is an exceedingly short-sighted view of something that can and will prove to be an increasingly existential challenge to HNs existence. States are already pushing towards and have passed age verification laws for example with supreme court signoff. This is just a continuation and the next step down that pathway. In any other year I would agree with you that this is just a single thing pushed by a loon that would be shut down in court. If these laws get passed and anything tangentially related to transgender stuff is viewed as obscene are you and the rest of HN prepared to either censor the site or deal with the consequences of being in the political crosshairs?

We can't make moderation HN decisions out of a fear that a censorship bill proposed by a small group of activist rank-and-file legislators in Michigan might eventually lead to us "being in the political crosshairs". That kind of "thin end of the wedge" fear is no different to the kind that's drummed up by the people proposing these laws. If we're not going to apply the HN guidelines and norms consistently we may as well not have them. It's interesting to see people who participate on HN every day repeatedly telling us that our guidelines and our ways of implementing them are bad.

My point isn't that the HN guidelines and norms should change, but rather there's a high chance of the norms being forced to change as the US government further puts its thumb on the internet. Again, saying it's a small group of activist legislators is ignoring the greater wave on the horizon. I say this as someone that's in the gaming community primarily which has resulted in significant changes already as a result of the payment processor shenanigans.

We've had several major stories about the effect of payments censorship on the gaming industry and will continue to do so. We're not ignoring the issues, just maintaining standards for when they count as significant new information. Indeed if we didn't do that, the major stories abut the topic would be diluted and more easily lost in the milieu.

This thread is currently flagged. If you are just letting normal penalties pull this off the front page, why keep the flag?

The UK age verification laws were discussed very extensively on HN before becoming law. Here is one example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30256984

Or more generally, just search for HN threads about 'proposed laws':

https://www.google.com/search?q=hn+%22proposed+law%22+ycombi...

I am not convinced that there has ever been a de facto HN policy of flagging threads about proposed laws. I don't see it in the guidelines or in the historical actions of the moderators or community.

It all depends on how close it is to becoming a real law. If it's an official policy of the party that's in government and the bill is a complete piece of legislation [1] whose passage is inevitable and imminent, then it can be considered an "interesting new phenomenon" and warrants a discussion.

That doesn't seem to be the case here. As far as I can establish, the bill's sponsors don't have any leadership roles in the state legislature and it's not an official policy of the party's leadership. It looks every bit like routine activism and headline-seeking by low-ranking members of the legislature.

Dang has commented about this routinely over the years.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

That makes sense, but it’s not what you said (“HN has always preferred to wait until something is actually passed into law before…”) Hence my response.

OK fair enough. There will always exceptions when we use absolutist language like that, but "actually passed into law" and "certain to be passed into law" can be considered the same thing.

The bill's text: https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2025-2026/billintro...

> includes any content, digital, streamed, or otherwise distributed on the internet, the primary purpose of which is to sexually arouse or gratify, including videos, erotica, magazines, stories, manga, material generated by artificial intelligence, live feeds, or sound clips.

So I assume this will also include OF, dark romance books, online blogs, shared texts in group chats?

Does this mean that a spouses Facebook page is illegal if they are cute?

Clickbait. This bill is going nowhere, it doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell.

I don't know, Hell seems pretty cold lately.

Any person who says he answers to Jesus Christ alone is wholly unsuitable for being a politician. (As per his Wikipedia article, he does.)

Do people not realize that something is seriously wrong with Hacker News when all exposes of the bad actions of the Republican Party immediately get flagged? What is dang doing about it? I think article flagging should be removed altogether, replaced by automatic flagging when it has -5 points.

If Michigan's proposal were to become law, it would have extreme repercussions on the tech industry to block off Michigan.

Google ads for Michigan area VPN keywords will skyrocket that's for sure.

Only a matter of time before they outlaw VPNs.

Use/distribution of any VPN tool is 100-500k penalty per

Damn..

Handmaid's tale looking more prophetic by the day!

Positively clearvoyant!

The Republican Party proposed it

Of course! Nothing says "small government" like going through every person's internet history and DVD collection to find things they personally don't like and making people a criminal because of them.

How will they enforce this?

It says right there in the article: "The bill would require internet service providers in Michigan to use filters to prevent people from seeing the prohibited material. "

VPNs do exist, but still.

woods porn is back in Michigan

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