Do conservatives buy more porn?

That's the suggestion of an article at the New Scientist, based on a paper by Harvard professor Benjamin Edelman, who is quoted as saying "Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by". While possibly true, his data suggests nothing of the kind.

The paper uses two aggregations of data: state and zip code level. The finding that conservatives consume more porn is based on results at the state level, but that's meaningless. All it means is conservative states consume, on average, more porn. It says nothing of who is buying the porn. Is it conservatives, as Edelman suggests in the New Scientist, or is it liberal's who can't find many other options since they live in a predominantly conservative state?

Edelman's data by zip code suggests its actually probably the later. Table 3 of his paper gives more detail since he uses less aggregated data, and so can get a better idea of individual responses (its still not perfect, but its better than using state data).

The coefficient on "Regularly attend religious services", while not statistically significant, is negative. It looks like those that attend services consume less porn. He comments on this finding by saying:

a 1 percent increase in the proportion of people who report regularly attending
religious services is associated with a 0.10 percent reduction in the proportion of
purchases that occur on Sunday. This analysis suggests that, on the whole, those
who attend religious services shift their consumption of adult entertainment to
other days of the week, despite on average consuming the same amount of adult entertainment as others.

Though he presents no evidence for these claims. In the paper, Edelman does not make the error of directly assuming who is consuming the porn, but he is quoted by the New Scientist of believing that we know. Is this yet more evidence that researchers are so obsessed with their own notoriety to the point that they'll make unfounded claims, or was he misquoted? I hope the later.