New Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson doesn't seem to have done himself any favors when he catapulted himself from a non-legislating backbencher to one of the most prominent positions on Capitol Hill. Until now, reporters had little interest in combing through Johnson's life before Congress. But now that he’s speaker, a video of him casually suggesting to a crowd that he and his 17-year-old son monitor each other's porn-viewing habits becomes a story worth—wait, hold on, back up there.
Johnson and his son do what together? Per Rolling Stone:
“It sends a report to your accountability partner. My accountability partner right now is Jack, my son. He’s 17. So he and I get a report about all the things that are on our phones, all of our devices, once a week. If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice. I’m proud to tell ya, my son has got a clean slate.”
Right off the bat, having an "accountability partner" monitoring your “objectionable” content is ew. Second of all, making your teenage son your "accountability partner" is a double-layered ew since that seems about the worst choice for an “accountability partner”—and look, I'm sorry, I'm just not going to be able to get that horrifyingly loaded phrase out of my head, nor rid myself of the notion that this is all a very roundabout way to make sure any porn sent to your device as unwanted spam, phishing attempts, or for any other reason immediately gets forwarded to your teen son.
Johnson was promoting an internet monitoring app called "Covenant Eyes," which when installed reports visits to naughty websites, where "naughty" is whatever is put on a list by people who throw around words like covenant. According to Johnson’s description of the service, it blocks pornographic sites and appears to take regular screenshots of your devices. So it's a standard child-monitoring app but with a bonus of, uhhh, the children can also monitor what the parents are doing if you want them to? To build mutual trust, I guess? Because sure, that’s a task you want to share with your children: weekly checkups on everybody’s possible porn usage.
The video resurfaced in a post from Receipt Maven on the hellsite formerly known as Twitter.
The high point of that clip might be the news that this service costs around $15 a month, which means Johnson, who has no known bank account, is dropping some serious coin on this Family Porn-Sharing Plan.
As for his 17-year-old son's "clean slate" on never wanting to see anything pertaining to sex ever ever ever, it's likely that preachy politician Johnson would lie his tan pants off about that, especially to all his churchy friends. At best Johnson has discovered that his teen son is at least clever enough to stick to the paper-and-ink versions rather than risking the alarms of the Parental Porn Monitorbot 3000.
But mostly, I can't shake the feeling that this software and its "accountability partner" feature is a way for Very Christian fathers and sons to send each other their favorite porn links without letting the rest of the family in on it?
"Son, I see you've visited a page titled 'Family Camping Trip XXX Hot MILF Carnal Sins' 27 times in the last three days, so I went to check on it as your accountability partner."
"You should, Father. And as your accountability partner, I see you visited 'Ted Cruz porn original link' three times, so I investigated it but I think ‘Family Camping Trip’ is better."
"Yes, well, consider yourself monitored. If anyone asks, I'll be telling them you have a clean slate again this week. Also, can I borrow another $15?"
"Sure, Father. Have a good time being speaker of the House today."
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