How Project 2025 Might Punish Your Hard-On
HINT: It's already happening all across America. (Scroll to the end to listen to this post.)
Imagine you’re a guy with a hard-on. You don’t have a steady or casual partner, and you’re tired of using your hand. You want to relieve yourself in the company of a warm body.
Even though it’s illegal in most US places, you seek out a sex worker. It’s your virgin experience with a prostitute, your first time paying for pleasure. Understandably, you’re nervous.
You pull up to a nondescript motel, don a baseball cap, and exit your truck. You try to look inconspicuous as you make your way to the room number she named on the phone.
When she opens the door, she’s a vision of flesh and garters and lace. You already feel the bulge in your jeans as she pulls you into the room, closes the door, and asks you to sit on the bed.
“Before we get started, honey,” she croons, “I just need you to tell me why you’re here.”
“I’m here to pay you for sex,” you grind out, one hand already on your belt buckle.
“STAY WHERE YOU ARE!” Uniformed men burst from the bathroom, guns drawn.
Your life changes when you hear the words, “You’re under arrest for soliciting a prostitute.”
At your hearing, the judge offers you a choice: Six months in jail or eight weeks in a ‘john school,’ an anti-prostitution program sponsored by the county. It’ll cost $525 out of your own pocket, but since it’s your first offense, you’ll avoid jail and have a reduced charge on your record.
Of course, you pick the eight week anti-prostitution program. Duh.
This ‘john school’ meets in a church basement. The man who leads it waves a Bible and screams about the sin of lust and how perverted you are for giving into your urges. He talks about hellfire a lot.
For eight weeks, you learn all the ways the Bible says lust will destroy your life. Attendance is mandatory. Bible study and group prayer are also mandatory. You’re required to download an “anti-pornography tracking app” for your smartphone. Plus, you have to report to a ‘Christian mentor’ and reveal all the things that turn you on so that he can help you find Biblical ways to suppress those urges.
This isn’t a work of short fiction. It is a story from The Guardian (source here.) Since 2016, this Christian Nationalist program has been run in Texas by a business called Jesus Said Love. Annual revenues average over $500,000 a year.
Programs like this have already been operating in Texas for more than a decade. From the article:
In 2011, Texas passed a state law allowing any county or city to create a john school as an alternative to fines or incarceration. As with drunk driving, it is the local prosecutor’s decision whether attendance at a john school is required under misdemeanor charges for soliciting.
Readers are already asking how they will prosecute people who break their Christian Nationalist laws. Forced indoctrination programs to avoid jail time are one example. Untold thousands of these programs already exist.
We know a lot about crisis pregnancy centers. Republican legislatures already funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to these religious facilities.
But we don’t hear as much about homeless shelters, addiction treatment facilities, food banks, shelters for abused women and rehabilitation programs that require religious indoctrination.
I’d like to change that. If enough people pay for this newsletter, I would be able to hire a researcher to dig up more of these programs.
While we couldn’t be as thorough as The Guardian reporter, we could give readers a sense of the extent to which Christian Nationalist Republicans are already forcing Americans to live their Christo-fascist vision. It’s so much bigger than abortion, though abortion gets the most attention. If more people understood the variety and extent of these programs, we might convince a few more people to vote for freedom and democracy this November.
It infuriates me the way our government at all levels violates the separation of church and state every day. From elected officials, including the president, attending and speaking at the prayer breakfast, not as private citizens but in their official capacities, to sentencing people to these religion based programs, to showering medicare and medicaid dollars on catholic "hospitals", to abstinence only indoctrination replacing medically accurate sex education programs in the public schools. I keep thinking of more... there are just too many to list. And that's without Project 2025!
I laughed out loud at the first sentence of this post. Kudos.
I imagine too many people don't care about these programs because (they think) you only end up in one of them if you get in some kind of 'trouble'. And for this purpose being abused or being poor counts as trouble. So yes we need to demonstrate how widespread this is and how it is intended to ultimately ensnare everyone.