AUSTIN, Texas — The leader of the American Principles Project (APP), a well-funded, anti-porn conservative lobby, claimed last week that his group is behind the porn age verification laws passed in recent months by seven states, and admitted they were experiments so that the next Republican U.S. attorney general can prosecute anyone uploading adult content that could be seen by a minor.
“We’d really like to get Florida done,” the APP’s Terry Schilling told Fox News. “We’d like to do something in Georgia. Ohio would be great. We’ve got it done in seven states right now. So, we have 43 more to go.”
As XBIZ reported, Schilling bragged in early 2022 that his group was also behind the current Republican-led book-banning movement, and that his goal was to purge “pornography” from libraries.
Speaking about the state-by-state effort to pass age verification laws — most of which are based on the Louisiana law, which went into effect Jan. 1 — Shilling told Fox that Texas was “the crown jewel” for his movement.
“It was the biggest state that we had,” Schilling enthused, adding that his organization began working and coalition-building several years earlier to accomplish that goal.
Schilling added that for proponents of state censorship of adult material, the real issue is that current anti-obscenity laws at the federal level are not being enforced.
“So what we wanted to do was build momentum at the state level, show that it can be done, use the laboratories of democracy, and then build up momentum to get the next attorney general of the United States to actually enforce these laws and require these companies to verify that these are actually adults, not children, that are viewing this obscene material,” Schilling told Fox.
Schilling: Censoring Porn Will Make People 'Happier'
The second-generation conservative activist, who is the son of late religious conservative Illinois and Iowa politician Bobby Schilling, dismissed Pornhub’s blocking of its platform in the states that had passed vaguely worded age verification mandates.
“What they’re betting on is that they’ll be able to create such an uproar by people that watch porn,” Schilling theorized. “They’re making the wrong bet because what’s going to end up happening is these people that can’t get access to porn, they’re going to be a lot happier, and they’re going to realize that this was something that was not that great in their life and move on and hopefully find a partner and a spouse to be intimate with instead of a computer screen.”
Schilling’s American Principles Project has a lower profile than older crusading anti-porn outfits such as NCOSE — formerly Morality in Media — Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council or louder upstarts such as Exodus Cry — and the related endeavors of that group’s former mouthpiece, Laila Mickelwait. However, the APP has been wielding its checkbook power in several electoral races, with a related super PAC that has spent millions on recent efforts to elect candidates who support its social and cultural agenda.
In 2021, congressional news site The Hill reported that the APP was rolling out a membership program known as “APP’s Big Family,” which the organization dubbed an “NRA for families.” The group’s hope, Schilling told The Hill, was “to replicate the NRA’s vast membership base.” He suggested copying the NRA’s model of rallying “an activist army of people across the country” around culture war issues.
In interviews and his literature, Schilling claims to speak for “families,” seemingly assuming that all families hold views identical to his own or those of his organization’s membership.
A Conservative Preoccupied With Porn and 'Butt-Sex'
In April 2020, Schilling penned an anti-porn op-ed for The American Conservative magazine, claiming there was “a growing chorus of leaders calling for an increasingly out-of-control porn industry to finally be held accountable. And as more evidence comes in, it could not be clearer that porn use is indeed out of control.”
During the 2020 election cycle, Schilling advocated granting more power to the Department of Justice through “more powerful porn laws” that he wanted Congress to pass. He also revealed that multiple conservative groups working behind the scenes, including the APP, have “actively pushed” the DOJ to revive 20th-century-style obscenity prosecutions to target adult content online.
The same year, Schilling became the subject of controversy over since-deleted tweets from 2019 in which he denigrated gay marriage and bemoaned the prospect of having to “explain butt sex” to his children, should they ask about the subject.
Main Image: American Principles Project's Terry Schilling