And people who are enslaved to their passions inevitably become slaves to tyrants. Thus, our Founders predicated the success of democracy in America upon the virtue of the American people. In light of this, it is positively Orwellian to suggest, as Forman does, that America is free because it produces hardcore pornography. The Founders forbade pornography not only because it subverts virtue, but because it attacks the political foundations of society. Though largely consumed in private, pornography becomes a political problem when it is widespread because it undermines chastity.
Chastity is integral to the functioning of the irreducible core of a polity.
Aristotle begins The Politics not with a single individual, but with a description of a man and a woman together in the family, without which the rest of society cannot exist. A healthy family is posited upon the proper and exclusive sexual relationship between a husband and wife. The family alone is capable of providing the necessary stability for the profound relationship which sexual union both symbolizes and cements and for the welfare of the children that issue from it. Violations of chastity undermine not only the family, but society as a whole. That is why chastity may be spoken of as the first political principle.