The Good Lord's Porn Enthusiast
Hands can never be idle when they're in prayer.
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Since 2023, Ryan Walters has served as the Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, charged with overseeing, implementing, and reviewing the policies of the state’s public school system.
Prior to that, for three years, he served as the Secretary of Education, responsible for supervision of the state’s various related agencies and standards.
So, how’s he done in these two executive roles over the past five years?
Well, according to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—also known as The Nation’s Report Card—Oklahoma ranks 44th in 4th grade math, 46th in 4th grade reading, 45th in 8th grade math, and 47th in 8th grade reading,
The 2025 WalletHub overall assessment of public schools, released this week, ranks Oklahoma 49th among states. The 2025 World Population Review K-12 academic performance assessment puts it at 48th. Data Pandas places it at 45th overall, and the ConsumerAffairs Journal of Consumer Research puts it at 49th in academic performance.
Now, look, I’m not getting down on the good folks of Oklahoma. I was born there, and half my father’s family is from the Sooner State. These students and their parents deserve a hell of a lot better from their leaders.
But none of this is particularly surprising in light of Mr. Walters dedicating his tenure to a predominant focus on rightwing “culture war” nonsense. He’s obsessed.
Last year, he issued a mandate requiring a King James Version Bible in every public school classroom, 5th thru 12th grades, and asked for $3 million to carry out the initiative.
Seems expensive, right? Well, it ain’t just any Bible. He insisted the state purchase “The Greenwood Bible” being hawked by Lee Greenwood (yes, that one) and endorsed by Trump, who personally receives royalties from every sale.
He has pushed for overhauling the state’s public school curriculum to include space promoting conspiracy theories, such as the 2020 presidential election being stolen and the COVID-19 virus originating from a Chinese lab.
In 2023, he announced a state partnership with PragerU Kids, the widely condemned program shamelessly promoting revisionist history that, among other things, depicts Frederick Douglass justifying slavery.
He’s also quite the enthusiast when it comes to fear-mongering over pornography and “radical sexual material” in schools, though it’s consistently been unclear what exactly merits his attention on this matter because there seems to be an absence of both.
In 2023, he successfully forced an elementary school principal to resign after a rightwing public smear campaign drew attention to the educator performing as a drag queen in his private life. Mr. Walters then proposed a ban on educators engaging in any such related activities.
Last year, he made national news again for threatening to strip one school district’s accreditation if they failed to remove Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” and Jeannette Walls’ “The Glass Castle” from their libraries, deeming them inappropriate for references to sexual abuse experienced by children.
When they balked—as any collection of reasonable adults would—he accused them of “fighting to keep pornography on their shelves.” Carrying out his wishes are the Library Media Review Committee, to which he appointed Chaya Raichi, the voice behind the anti-LGBTQ Libs of TikTok social media account. She does not live in Oklahoma.
Clearly, this is a God-fearing man who bravely recognizes inappropriate sexual content before it even exists — indeed, a prophet in his own time.
So, it came as some surprise when reports emerged that Mr. Walters is being accused of displaying pornography on a television in his office during an executive session of the State Board of Education this past Thursday, according to a few board members in attendance.
Becky Carson and Ryan Deatherage—both of whom were appointed this year to the Board by Republican Gov. Kevin Stitts—were the only two in a position to see the screen and were understandably shocked. Here’s what Ms. Carson said:
I was like, ‘What am I seeing?’ I kind of was in shock, honestly. I started to question whether I was actually seeing what I was seeing,” Carson said. “I was like, ‘Is that woman naked?’ And then I was like, ‘No, she’s got a body suit on.’ And it happened very quickly, I was like, ‘That is not a body suit.’ And I hate to even use these terms, but I said, ‘Those are her nipples.’ And then I was looking closer, and I got a full-body view, and I was like, ‘That is pubic hair.’ Even right now, I couldn’t even tell you what I was watching.
I was so disturbed by it, that I was like — very loudly and boastfully, like I was a parent or a teacher — I said, ‘What is on your TV? What am I watching?’ He was like, ‘What? What are you talking about?’ He stood up and saw it. He made acknowledgment that he saw it,” Carson recalled. “And I said, ‘Turn it off. Now.’ And he was like, ‘What is this? What is this?’ So he acknowledged it was inappropriate just by those words. And he was like, ‘I can’t get it to turn off. I can’t figure out how to turn it off.’ And I said, ‘Get it turned off.’ So he finally got it turned off, and that was the end of it. He didn’t address it. He didn’t apologize. Nothing was said.
Mr. Deatherage concurred: “I don’t know if he turned it off or switched the channel, I don’t remember. I was surprised that when he came back to the table, he was not apologetic. I didn’t ever hear an apology for that being on, and he didn’t seem to be fazed that it was on.”
Republican leaders in the State Senate are now launching an investigation into the matter, which they described as a “bizarre and troubling situation.” All seem unanimously perplexed and concerned.
To be fair, despite the curious circumstances, it has obviously not yet been proven that Mr. Walters is personally responsible for the pornography displayed on his television next to his desk in his office.
Sure, it’s possible that he’s the stereotypical Porn-Again Christian, but it’s also plausible that he just received a few strokes of bad luck. Maybe he was simply shafted by fate. Maybe he’s the victim of premature contextualization.
Mr. Walters faces a reassessment by voters next year, and it’s too early to tell if he’s about to experience any professional symptoms of electoral dysfunction. Perhaps he’ll crank out a reasonable explanation for all this against the stiff opposition.
In the meantime, I sure hope he doesn’t let this get a rise out of him. I hope he’ll remember that hands can never be idle when they’re put together in prayer.
And I certainly hope he’ll recall that Scripture tells us joy cometh in the morning, though I admit—please and thank you—that I’d rather be spared the details on what cometh within Mr. Walters’ office.
Exquisite use of metaphor! Well played 😉
Wow. Why is it nearly always the far-right who hypocritically get caught with porn/underage children, etc.