The issue of pornography and whether it is a benign or malignant influence on society has been a persistent and controversial topic in American society since at least the emergence of Hugh Hefner and the Playboy “philosophy” in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
As the sexual revolution of the 1960s progressed, pornography became a part of the revolution’s public relations campaign. Porn’s detractors were caricatured as “prudes” and uptight, religious bigots who wanted to repress healthy sexual expression.
I distinctly remember as a young pastor in the 1970s that President Carter hosted a White House conference on pornography, which amazingly concluded that pornography was a “victimless” crime. What an astounding, morally obtuse statement.
The first victims were the women who were objectified and dehumanized in the making of the product. I remember once interviewing a woman (a preacher’s daughter) who had run away from home and gotten entangled in the porn industry. She had managed to escape pornography’s web and found her way back to her Christian faith. She was traveling around the country sharing her testimony as a warning to others. In my naiveté, I asked her, “How many of the women and girls you know doing pornography were addicted to illicit drugs?” She fixed me with a look of amazement and replied, “All of them. You couldn’t do what we do if you weren’t desensitized by illicit drugs!”
A “victimless” crime? Society’s experience in the intervening decades has revealed to us how pornography dehumanizes and objectifies women and children. Study after study (including the Reagan Administration’s “Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography” (The Meese Commission) has shown how pornography is addictive for many men and viewing it leads many of them to seek out evermore hardcore pornography in order to get the same dopamine high.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of porn’s ever more ubiquitous presence in society has been the exponential increase in increasing violent, hardcore pornography, including rampant sexual crimes against children.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at The Christian Post)
