Top Stories This Week

• What’s happening at Woodhull;
• The administrative state and abortion rights;
• State supreme courts post-Roe;
• Project 2025 and the plan to ban porn;
• Recent Supreme Court cases about free speech;
• LGBTQIA+ bias and the death penalty; and
• Woodhull’s take on disability and the “marriage penalty.”

Last Chance to register for “Sex Ed in a Censored Nation!” 

Will you be joining Mandy Salley, Rosalie M. Wong, Jaclyn Friedman and Alison Macklin for August’s Censorship Series program tomorrow at Noon EDT?

Sex educators face censorship in all facets of their work today. Book bans, educational gag orders, and the increased power of the “parental rights” movement have made offering comprehensive sex education increasingly difficult. State-sanctioned censorship joins rampant online censorship to create an inhospitable environment for students and educators alike. We’ll discuss all that and more on Thursday. 

Woodhull’s Take on Project 2025 for Artists After Dark Magazine 

Woodhull’s fearless leader, Ricci Levy, contributed to the latest edition of Artists After Dark Magazine. She wrote about the dangers Project 2025 poses to boudoir photographers. Her message bears repeating! 

Read a short excerpt of her piece here:

“Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be Shuttered.”

That’s a direct quote from Project 2025, a plan designed to reshape the U.S. government under a conservative administration. The plan has many frightening proposals, and I encourage you to look at the whole plan (not before bedtime - you’ll never sleep!), but I want to share with you today about one of it’s goals that will directly impact your career!

One of the most concerning aspects of Project 2025 for photographers is its stance on adult content. The proposal advocates for banning pornography and shutting down tech and telecommunications companies that facilitate access to such content. The project advocates for policies that would reduce the accessibility and acceptance of pornography in American society, viewing it as “detrimental to family values and societal health.”

Woodhull’s Research Featured on Phys.org!
Our research about the impact of online de-platforming on sex workers was featured in a piece on Phys.org recently. Phys.org is a part of ScienceX which has a readership of over 10 million, and is “one of the largest online communities for science-minded people.” Haven’t had a chance to check out what our researchers, Dr. Ditmore and Dr. Majic found?

Read all about it in the June issue of Social Sciences or watch Dr. Ditmore & Dr. Majic break down their findings in our May Censorship Series program, “Navigating Cyberspace.” We hope to see this data spread far and wide, and used to fight against online censorship! 

(Anna Moneymaker/Getty)

Why Smashing the Administrative State Is a Disaster for Reproductive Rights (Mother Jones) 

The Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce rulings overturned “Chevron deference,” which previously protected federal agencies’ power to issue regulations. The ruling’s significance is immense for reproductive rights issues. Nina Martin writes: “If the implications for reproductive rights weren’t immediately obvious, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made the stakes clear in a blistering dissent. She pointed to efforts by anti-abortion doctors to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of mifepristone—a case the justices rejected in June on the narrow grounds that the doctors didn’t have standing to sue. Now, Jackson suggested, the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in 2000 would be ‘fair game.’” Read more.

(Shutterstock/Austen Risolvato/Rewire News Group illustration)

State Supreme Courts Step Up in the Fight to Rebuild Access After ‘Roe’ (Rewire News Group) 

Throughout this summer, state supreme courts have increasingly been issuing decisions on abortion bans in their state. Jessica Mason Pieklo writes: “Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, abortion rights were understood primarily in a federal context, as defined by the Constitution. That’s not to say that state courts and constitutions didn’t matter before Dobbs. In states like Kansas and Oklahoma, they certainly did. But by overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court made sure those state supreme courts mattered everywhere. And in the short term, that could be a good thing for efforts to restore abortion rights nationwide.” Read more.

(Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Project 2025 Co-Author Caught Admitting the Secret Conservative Plan to Ban Porn (The Intercept) 

Recently, One of Project 2025’s co-authors, Russell Vought, admitted to a secret conservative plan to ban porn, including through stating, “We’d have a national ban on pornography if we could, right?” Shawn Musgrave writes: “Dozens of states have enacted or considered these ‘age verification laws,’ many of them modeled on the [Center for Renewing America]’s proposals. This year, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to Texas’s version, which took effect last September and drew from CRA’s model legislation. But in a wide-ranging, covertly recorded conversation with two undercover operatives — a paid actor and a reporter for the British journalism nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting — Vought let them in on a thinly veiled secret: These age verification laws are a pretext for restricting access to porn more broadly.” Read more.

(Electronic Frontier Foundation)

In These Five Social Media Speech Cases, Supreme Court Set Foundational Rules for the Future (Electronic Frontier Foundation) 

A slew of 1st Amendment free speech cases have been on the Supreme Court’s docket, including cases about online speech, which all hold great bearing on exercising our other human rights. David Greene writes: “The U.S. Supreme Court addressed government’s various roles with respect to speech on social media in five cases reviewed in its recently completed term. The through-line of these cases is a critically important principle that sets limits on government’s ability to control the online speech of people who use social media, as well as the social media sites themselves: internet users’ First Amendment rights to speak on social media—whether by posting or commenting—may be infringed by the government if it interferes with content moderation, but will not be infringed by the independent decisions of the platforms themselves.” Read more.

(The Appeal)

In U.S. Courts, Anti-LGBTQ+ Bias Can Be a Death Sentence (The Appeal) 

LGBTQ+ capital defendants – folks who are facing the death penalty – face discrimination in the U.S. capital punishment system. Adam M. Rhodes writes: “According to an analysis by The Appeal of more than two dozen criminal court cases in which LGBTQ+ defendants faced the death penalty, anti-LGBTQ+ bias impacted more than half of those cases in some capacity. The Appeal collected cases through media reports, academic journals, and legal documents. But that number may still represent just a fraction of LGBTQ+ people sentenced to death due to the many reasons people may not disclose being queer, particularly in criminal legal proceedings.” Read more.

(The Verge)

Woodhull’s Take: Ending the Marriage Penalty (Woodhull’s Sex & Politics Blog) 

Disability justice and marriage equality are intertwined. We at the Woodhull Freedom Foundation share our take on: “‘Will you marry me? Imagine that was a question you could never actually answer,’ says disability rights activist Imani Barbarin, reflecting on the ‘marriage penalty.’ The term describes the legal rule that, as Sage Howard puts it, ‘robs disabled people of a chunk of their supplemental security income (SSI) if they decide to get married.’ The choice, for many, is as follows: get married to the person you love, or protect your access to health care and SSI.” Read more.

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