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Posted on 05/26/2012 12:59:12 PM PDT by CHRISTIAN DIARIST
The porn industry was featured last night on CNBC, which took its viewers “inside the $13 billion business of pleasure.”
Well, there is no doubt that millions of Americans derive pleasure from porn, which may be found at the magazine stand, in the video store, on regular and pay-per-view cable and, of course, all over the Internet.
But it is the passing pleasure of sin, as the Scripture warns us. It has a corrosive effect on our souls.
That is borne out by the powerful testimonies of men and women alike who have experienced, first-hand, the deleterious effects of porn on their lives; whose woeful stories were not presented on CNBC.
Like the Virginiapsychologist who’s husband’s porn addiction led him to abandon her and their five children.
Writing in the National Review, she recounted that her man hooked up with “an unemployed alcoholic with all the physical qualities of a porn star – bleached blonde hair, heavy makeup, provocative clothing, and big breasts.”
She was convinced that her former husband “succumbed to the allure of the secret fantasy life he had been indulging since adolescence.” And she cited several studies backing up her conclusion that porn alters behavior.”
What I find most compelling about her testimony was her conclusion that porn gives “the impression that aberrant sexual practices are more common than they really are, and that promiscuous behavior is normal.”
Michael Leahy, author of “Porn Nation,” offered the perspective of a wayward husband, whose youthful porn habit led an adult sex addiction.
“It took losing my 15-year-marriage,” he lamented, “my boys, my job, my affair partner, any hopes of reconciliation with and re-marrying (my former wife), and a whole lot of money to hit rock bottom. That’s what it took to finally get my attention.”
Leahy now devotes himself to travelling around the country, evangelizing against the evil of pornography.
Then there is Sophia Lynn, who starred in porn films to make money to support herself and her child after a divorce, she told ABC News.
She was delivered from the supposed business of pleasure with the intercession of Heather Veitch, an ex-stripper turned Christian evangelist. Lynn gave her life to Christ and took a job as a church secretary in Sioux Falls,S.D.
“This is like a dream,” said the former porn star. “I feel like my life has been saved.”
The testimonies of the Virginia psychologist, of Leahy and of Lynndispel the myth that porn is an innocent, victimless vice.
It is a blight upon America. It is a tool of the ruler of this fallen world, whom, the Scripture warns, is like a roaring lion, seeking whom he can devour.
Porn also reduces your mental capacity.
With freedom comes responsibility — personal responsibility. If a whore does porn and ruins her life, who is to blame here? If a druggie does drugs and ruins their life, who is to blame? Government cannot protect people from themselves. Policing the degenerates will lead to a degenerate-centric politics, laws, and culture. It already has. Instead of accentuating positives, people in power will concentrate on admonishing negatives, thus creating a severe negative and cynical climate. The economy is a trillion dollar one... 12 billion dollar porn industry is nothing.
My 2 cents.
Well, it’s been shown that gay men are on average more intelligent and successful than heterosexual men.
From this, one can posit that exposure to women causes brain damage.
Just Kidding :)
At one point it was a $13 billion industry but I highly doubt it is today. I'd be very curious where CNBC got this figure. Much like the recording industry, the porn industry has seen their profits take a huge hit as their product gets downloaded for free off the internet. Unlike the recording industry who have powerful friends in Washington, there's nobody fighting for the porn industry. As such, one can literally spend their entire waking day looking at virtually limitless porn sites on the internet and not spend a single dime doing so.
Does it really? How does that work-I’m not trying to be sarcastic or anything, I am seriously interested. I had never heard that before.
Does it have an effect on a certain part of the brain?
That sounds like a number from the before time, the time before hopey-changey whatever.
I can’t see how the porn crowd is making the big bucks either with all of the free sites that exist.
****porn sites on the internet and not spend a single dime doing so. ****
Too much internet porn and your computer will catch VD viruses!
There are always linux live discs.
There have been numerous studies that show it does damage. It changes the chemistry in the brain and people become addicted to it.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
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Actually, you really are more likely to catch computer viruses if you visit porn websites. It is a sleazy industry run by sleazy people.
And yet... violent crime, including sex crimes, have plunged almost nonstop since the mid-90s. That’s not supposed to happen, right?
There is always going to be a tension between public safety and first amendment freedoms such as speech. Both are legitimate concerns of a free people. Some people would never, if completely free to choose, become addicted to porn, drugs, whatever, but are exposed to it very young, while still forming their capacity for discernment and judgment. It is really no fairer to blame these young people for the abuses they endure than to blame a rape victim for the deeds of the rapist. Many of them would never get involved in making porn but for manufactured dependencies, including drugs, foisted on them by porn groomers. It is not a pretty business model.
There are credible reports of a place near here (central Illinois) called “the farm,” where such “grooming” occurs on a regular basis. It is a vortex into which naïve rural teens are drawn ever deeper into a lifestyle from which there appears, to them, to be no escape. And because of the vast revenue involved, a number of local pols look the other way, including some here in Springfield. Don’t ask me which party. I believe it is a bipartisan corruption.
And thus porn raises a legitimate question of public safety. I favor laws that would restrict access to and production of pornography, if for no other reason than to delay a young person’s contact with such material until they have a chance to make fully free, fully informed choices. I further favor reforms that make “grooming” operations so painful that they cannot find a home in any state, least of all mine. That would involve punishing the politicians who ignore them as well as the people who run them.
What about free speech? The First Amendment was not designed to protect absolutely all possible forms of speech, least of all those that routinely involve criminal or quasi-criminal entanglements on the production side. Under precedent law, for example, we are not “free” to shout “fire” in a crowded theater if in fact there is no fire. Likewise, obscene speech does not enjoy the same level of protection as political speech, and that’s good. Society can make value judgments, and can work to encode them into law. That also is a form of free speech.
The problem we have in our post-Christian culture is that we are having such a hard time defining “obscene” that the meaning of the category is fading, and our ability to protect ourselves from it is fading as well. However, the whole point of natural law is that it speaks to Christian and non-Christian minds alike. Some things just do not have enough value that we must protect them at the cost of systematically and unnecessarily losing wave after wave of young people to a life of corruption. It is a disease and it walks in the company of real diseases. We have a legitimate interest in defending ourselves against it, not just as individuals, but as a culture.
Government is designed to promote Virtue. Anything that debases human beings-—make them nothing but animals with urges—with no rationality—is dehumanizing and destroys civil societies particularly the children—the future of society.
All the Founders and all philosophers knew that without Virtue, you can not have a free society.
Government has the power to block obscenity-—we had that until The Beats and ACLU and Flint, etc., and mass agitprop from Kinsey and the Deep Throat hollywood degenerates, who forced out Just Law to protect their degenerates, sick twisted ideas—so they could mainstream them to the children in their programing and Sex Ed classes in Public schools. It is uncontitutional.
Violent crime was “plunging” *before* the mid-90s (specifically 1993 to 1995, though there was a slight rise in 1992).
Obviously online porn has little to do with falling crime rates, considering the aforementioned decline was before TCP/IP was even built into Windows, much less the advent of broadband Internet access in the average American household.
One has to wonder what factors are really behind the falling rates. And if the FBI remains fairly honest, I’ll bet the rates will begin to level off and possibly start rising again once the stats are compiled for this year. Nothing to do with online porn, mind you... more like the 1970s’ stoking of radicalism and racial conflict.
Amen. Well said.
I don't disagree. It probably has little to do with violent crime at all. My point is that there is a pretty strong negative correlation between availability of porn and violent crime. With such numbers, it's difficult to make a case that porn is a significant causative factor in violent crime.
I read that it causes the more ‘primitive’ part of the brain to light up, which in many people requires a corrosponding drop in more civilized cognitive areas, or something like that. I’ll see if I can find one of the articles.
The porn business generates more annual revenues. Sad to say but you are right, it is close. Below shows the most recent published revenues for each of the Big-4 sports leagues in North America:
•NFL (2009-10) - $9.3 billion
•MLB (2010) - $7 billion
•NBA (2009-10) - $4.7 billion
•NHL (projected 2011) - $2.9 billion
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