WASHINGTON, D.C. — Donald Trump today announced his latest nominees for judicial positions, which includes elevating Judge Danielle J. Hunsaker to a federal seat in the traditionally progressive 9th Circuit.
The 9th Circuit covers most of the Western United States, including California, Nevada and Oregon, so adult industry cases are often heard by its judges.
What should perhaps worry the adult industry is that Judge Hunsaker has been involved as a board member for several years with the J. Reuben Clark Law Society, a low-profile organization of Mormon lawyers with the stated mission "to affirm the strength brought to the law by a lawyer's personal religious conviction."
The organization’s Oregon chapter celebrated her appointment to Washington County Circuit Court in 2017, calling her “our very own Danielle Hunsaker.”
The J. Reuben Clark Law Society, like many Mormon organizations, also gives a forum to some of the most outlandish anti-porn propaganda being disseminated by religiously motivated lobbies waging the current War on Porn.
Drumming up fear about a supposed “public health crisis” around the scientifically debunked concept of “porn addiction,” the War on Porn propagandists also routinely equate all consensual sex work between adults under the stigmatizing “human trafficking” umbrella. Utah was the first state of sixteen — and counting — to declare porn a “public health crisis.”
Mormon groups seem peculiarly obsessed with people’s porn consumption, particularly their own. The extremely deceptive “Fight the New Drug” movement was launched in Utah by Mormon marketing experts attempting to “rebrand” porn addiction for millennials.
The J. Reuben Clark Law Society is particularly active in recruiting young law students at Utah’s Brigham Young University. In 2004, the society’s BYU chapter at the J. Reuben Clark Law School invited Latter-day Saints leader Boyd K. Packer to speak to Mormon lawyers in what the Deseret News called “a stirring speech broadcast worldwide.”
"The world is spiraling downward at an ever-quickening pace. I am sorry to tell you it will not get better," President Packer, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, told the members of Hunsaker’s society. "I know of nothing in the history of the church or in the history of the world to compare with our present circumstances. Nothing happened in Sodom and Gomorrah which exceeds the wickedness and depravity which surrounds us now."
Profanity, vulgarity, blasphemy and pornography, according to the Mormon leader, "are broadcast into the homes and minds of the innocent. Unspeakable wickedness, perversion and abuse — not even exempting little children — once hidden in dark places, now seeks protection from courts and judges. The Lord needs you who are trained in the law. You can do for this people what others cannot do. We should not need to go beyond the members of the church to find superior legal counsel."
The Clark Memorandum, the official publication of BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, runs articles that spread the same kind of ill-informed fear-mongering about what others would call freedom of sexual expression.
“If we don’t do something now to protect America’s children from the bombardment of internet pornography, we will lose an entire generation of precious children to the sordid world of smut,” said BYU Law Professor Cheryl Preston in a 2007 issue of The Clark Memorandum. “I can’t let that happen, and the ICPA [Internet Community Ports Act, a censorship attempt founded by a Utah tech entrepreneur] is the best step anyone has taken to truly protect them from those who would drown them in the dark, sleazy world of pornography.”
“The Internet is soaked with pornography,” decried the journal at the time.
A recent J. Reuben Clark graduate, Savannah Lawrence, has served as a legal fellow for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), a religiously funded organization — beginning with Catholics in the 1960s — which hides its puritanical agenda of censorship and stigma behind the name EndSexualExploitation.org.
This group, formerly known as Morality in Media and Porn Harms, regularly lobbies Google and other tech giants, and even shamed supermarket chains into hiding the “disgusting” Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
In 2010, the J. Reuben Clark Law School invited the Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, to give a speech with the title “Catholics and Latter-day Saints: Partners in the Defense of Religious Freedom.”
“In recent years,” Cardinal George told the Mormon lawyers, “Catholics and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have stood more frequently side-by-side in the public square to defend human life and dignity."
"We have been together in combating the degradations associated with the pornography industry,” Cardinal George emphasized.
The adult industry will have to wait and see if Judge Hunsaker is confirmed and whether she might be motivated by the words of LSD President Packer inviting young Mormon lawyers to join a crusade against what he and his interfaith allies saw as an apocalyptic landscape "worse than Sodom and Gomorrah."