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As liberals are fond of telling us, pornography has been
part of the human experience since the dawn of time. It’s found on the walls of
a destroyed brothel in the ancient city of Pompeii. It’s found on Greek urns and
in archeological digs in Asia.
Few people in any culture went broke exploiting the
infinite human capacity to transform the God-given gift of sex into an engine of
lust, greed and perversion.
But now we are faced with a pornography industry that has
many powerful supports:
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An explosion in technology that makes pornography
universally available.
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A political movement that wields porn to destroy
family-based resistance to its totalitarian aims.
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A shift from indifference to outright promotion and
sale of even hard-core pornography on the part of large, multinational
corporations.
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A legal culture that is hostile to traditional values
and is transfixed on atomistic individualism at the expense of families,
communities and ultimately, nations.
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Those of us watching from the
United States are extremely thankful for Poland’s resistance to the siren song
of pornography, homosexual activism and the degradation of the family. Thank
God for Poland’s insistence on decency. It’s an inspiration to us all, and we
are all watching you buck the tide of the other nations in the European Union
that are drinking the Kool-Aid of sexual “liberation.”
When I was first getting into the
business of defending family values on the think tank level, I saw Dr. James
Dobson of Focus on the Family at a political conference. We were on a panel
discussing threats in the culture. I presented a study about America’s National
Endowment for the Arts and its bias towards avant-garde, anti-religious and
shocking ‘art’ that was designed to offend people and to violate standards of
decency. Dr. Dobson gave a talk on the effects of pornography, particularly on
families. Afterward, I asked him why, given all the well-documented evidence of
the harmful effects of pornography, can’t we win this part of the Culture War?
He said, and I’m paraphrasing,
“Because in many men’s closets, or in their dressers, there is a stack of
Playboys or some other so-called ‘soft’ pornography. When they hear us
attacking obscenity, it’s like hearing distant cannons. They know that
hard-core porn is bad, but they also know they have no business pointing a
finger at anyone else, given their own private stash.” Of course, now, we can
expand that to include the easy access to porn via the Internet.
The political and cultural Left
have a deep interest in promoting pornography. Millions of men who might have
championed the moral high ground in the public square feel that they don’t have
the right to take up any moral causes, given their own moral failures. One of
the Devil’s best tricks is to persuade us that we are not good enough ourselves
to favor good over evil, lest we be found out as hypocrites. Whatever you do,
don’t talk about grace and redemption.
The Bible verse says, “The
righteous are as bold as lions.” Shame keeps men on the sidelines, which is
where the Left wants them so it can continue forging a new society based on more
government control and less personal responsibility.
The Left advocates strict
government regulation of nearly everything in life –from what we can drive to
what kind of light bulbs we can use. Singer Sheryl Crow has even suggested that
people use only one square of toilet paper during each bathroom visit, except,
and I quote, for those “pesky occasions when two or three squares are
necessary.”
The one exception to this zealous
drive to regulate everything is sex. The Left wants unfettered access to
abortion, pornography, and homosexual sex because it advances their cause. All
three work together in an Iron Triangle.
I used to wonder why homosexuals
were in the forefront of those defending abortion clinics against people praying
outside. I thought, “They’re not having children, so why should they care?” But
it makes perfect sense. Porn, abortion and homosexuality all work to destroy
God’s design for the family, whose very existence is a constant rebuke to their
sad and destructive choices. Leftists do not want people to have any loyalties
other than to their socially superior masters.
C.S. Lewis once said that the
agenda of the Left is to make pornography public and religion private. This has
been the agenda of the American Civil Liberties Union and its international
allies for many decades. By confusing smut with freedom of speech, the ACLU has
managed to redefine public morality while pretending to maintain neutrality. If
capitalists were foolish enough, as Vladimir Lenin said, to give Communists the
rope to hang them with, too many well-meaning Americans are turning over their
United States Constitution to a group that is distorting its First Amendment
freedom of speech protections into a club to destroy all the other protected
liberties.
Many communities attempt to
balance the interests of public decency with those of professed civil
libertarians who demand public access to pornography. But they are unwittingly
siding with the pornographers. It is not a middle ground. In the absence of
clear, community standards, the pornographer gets to establish the moral tone.
Common sense, experience and research all show that the presence of sex-oriented
businesses (SOBs) bring crime, prostitution, and neighborhood decline wherever
they take root.
The explosive growth in
pornography in Western nations did not happen organically, that is, naturally,
but is part of an orchestrated, revolutionary movement to replace ordered
liberty with totalitarian control.
It is that serious.
After Russia fell to the
communists in 1917, Marxists waited in vain for workers to foment economic
revolution in the rest of Europe. It didn’t happen. The Communist advance did
not come from the bottom up but from the top down. So they switched tactics to
target the West.
Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci
flipped Marxism on its head by proclaiming that the culture, not the economic
structure, was the true foundation of society. He proclaimed a new battle cry:
“Capture the Culture.” Gramsci’s pupil, a German, Rudi Dutsche, came up with
the strategy: Marxists had to make “the long march through the institutions,”
which meant subverting universities, media, art, and entertainment.
In Frankfurt, Germany in 1923,
Marxists founded the Institute of Social Research, which became known simply as
the Frankfurt School. This center was moved to Geneva in 1933 when the Nazis
took over, then to New York, then to California, and finally back to the
University of Frankfurt in 1955. A history of the Frankfurt School by William
Lind is available on video at
www.freecongress.org. But to make a long story short, the school spawned the
likes of Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, who preached a new form of
cultural Marxism. Their weapon of choice was sexual freedom from Judeo-Christian
restraints. I can recall being assigned Marcuse’s book Eros and Civilization
when I was in college. Even then, I thought he was an odd bird, but my
professors liked him.
The ultimate aim of the Frankfurt
School and the Gramsci contingent was to destroy the family and the Church,
which stood in the way of a brand new social order that would usher in the new
Socialist Man. This was not a new idea. Friedrich Engels had proclaimed the
marriage-based family as the enemy decades before.
It all began coming together in
the 20th Century, with key elements falling into place.
1)
a group of dedicated revolutionaries who began selling sexual liberation
as a personal and social panacea;
2) a rapid growth in media which increased the availability of pornography.
3) Two World Wars, which put tremendous pressure on family life and helped
to push more women into unconventional roles and kept men away from their
families for long periods.
4) a new science of sexology, led by Alfred C. Kinsey, which provided the
academic basis for the justification of the sexual revolution that was about to
explode.
5) a degree of affluence that facilitated more leisure and thus the pursuit
of pleasure.
As Harvard sociologist Pitirim
Sorokin wrote in his classic 1941 study The Crisis of Our Age, America
was already shifting at that time from being an ideaistic culture, that
is, one that extols virtues attainable through delayed gratification, to a
sensate culture, in which the highest calling is inflaming and satisfying
the senses; in short, hedonism. He saw the shift in several places, most
notably in advertising, in which the ads began emphasizing the sensual and
pushing the envelope in terms of taste.
When Kinsey published his
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, a large segment of America’s
intelligentsia was ready to buy into his theme, which was that science had
proved that sexual normalcy is a myth, and a dangerous one at that. Marriage,
fidelity and restraint were inhibitions to an outlook that prized sexual
experiences above all. Religion was at the bottom of it all, so religion had to
be neutered, if not destroyed. One way to do that was to unleash wolves amid the
sheep. Hence we are living in a day when openly homosexual clergy are making
their claim to moral propriety.
Without critical examination, the
liberal media gave Kinsey a huge megaphone by which he proclaimed his new gospel
of sex. In 1953, as Kinsey published his companion volume, Sexual Behavior
in the Human Female, Kinsey’s astute pupil, a young man named Hugh Hefner,
unveiled the first issue of Playboy magazine. By combining serious
articles with pornographic photos, Hefner got around the censors and softened up
America, and eventually Europe, for more and more explicit pornography. Dr.
Judith Reisman, in several books including Kinsey, Sex and Fraud and
Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences, details how Kinsey and his associates, most
notably Planned Parenthood and the Sexual Information and Education Council of
the United States, worked to weaken laws against pornography and sexual
predators and to create a monolithic sex education establishment to rob children
of their innocence at younger and younger ages. Kinsey, himself a compulsive
homosexual and probably a pedophile, as revealed in recent biographies, used
junk science to justify his perverse predilections.
In 1956, Pitirim Sorokin
published another remarkable book, The American Sex Revolution. He argued
that America was now awash in pornography, had a shockingly high divorce rate
exceeding 10 percent, and was headed for decadent decline much in the manner of
Rome and Greece.
The spillover effect of
Playboy’s success was immediate. Advertising became more sexual, television
began pushing boundaries, and by the 1960s, with the addition of hallucinatory
drugs and unprecedented affluence, a generation bought into hedonism and free
sex, epitomized by the nudity and LSD binges at Woodstock in 1968. From then on,
through the last decades of the 20th Century and into the 21st,
the sexual revolution blossomed into more and more perverse forms, with
pornography as its currency. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to describe
pornography as a sort of cultural carpet bombing.
Such is the power of sex that the
AIDS epidemic among homosexual men, the rise in sexually transmitted diseases
from two – gonorrhea and syphilis in the 1960s – to more than 30 in the last
decade, and the litany of broken marriages, child abuse victims and broken men,
has not slowed it down. This is due partly to a liberal media and entertainment
industry that refuses to count the bodies and show the dark side of the sexual
revolution. Let the good times roll.
Fast forward to today. We are
facing a frightening future in which the worst, most explicit forms of
pornography are being readily accessed by children via the Internet and even
their cell phones and iPods. As C.S. Lewis observed, every power gained by man
also becomes a power over man.
There actually is some good news
amid all this, so let me conclude by sharing it.
There are signs that increasing
numbers of teens and young adults are waking up to the fact that some very
wicked people have stolen their innocence and destroyed the possibility of
romance. When they perceive this truth, they are able to resist. That’s why the
Left in the United States is right now attacking abstinence programs so
viciously. These courses, which are wildly popular with parents, succeed because
they de-program teens from the toxic cultural messages bombarding them in the
form of MTV, television programs, movies and music.
The totalitarian Left cannot
afford to allow any young minds to escape the conditioning. Their wholesomeness
is a direct threat to the cultivation of a universal, cynical outlook that is
ripe for manipulation by social engineers. It’s not for nothing that German
education autocrats are waging war on home schoolers.
But, the other good news is that
science is catching up and beginning to expose the toxic effects of pornography.
Numerous studies now show that exposure to porn results in attitudinal change,
behavioral change, and even alterations in brain structure.
Dr. Judith Reisman coined the
term “erototoxins” to describe the brain chemicals unleashed by viewing
pornography. In grown men, they create a pattern in the brain conducive to
ever-increasing urges to seek pleasure through more exposure. In children, they
create a profoundly dangerous primary pathway to addiction.
The nature of addiction—any
addiction – is really not that complicated, especially when you factor in
morality.
Human beings are prone to sin,
that is, to misuse our God-given bodies and brains to pursue pleasure at the
expense of family, community and ultimately of our relationship with God.
As psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey
Satinover, who now teaches at Princeton, notes, the brain is quite vulnerable to
accommodating addictions. Here’s what happens. A person looks at pornography and
experiences excitement through the excretion of chemicals such as adrenaline and
pleasure through the excretion of dopamine. This is followed by guilt, since
God’s laws are written in every human heart. To push the guilt away, the person
indulges in the activity once more, with the brain making it easier and easier
to access, but harder and harder to please. It takes more and more of a chemical
boost to reach pleasure. Thus the addiction requires harder and harder materials
or activities, whether it is alcohol, homosexuality or pornography.
Satinover notes that the Talmud
says, “Sin begins as thin as a spider’s web, but soon becomes a thick cord that
binds.” It’s a perfect description of the power of addiction.
To reverse this destructive trend
toward societal porn addiction, the demise of family life and the inevitable
rise of opportunistic government experts to pick up the pieces, we must expose
the porn industry for what it is, to shame the corporations that are trading in
it, and to educate the media as to the new science.
As dark as things now appear,
there is hope on the horizon. This very gathering is proof that people are
fighting back and arming themselves with the facts.
And we must remind ourselves,
often, that what is good and perfect and true is uniquely powerful because it
comes from an unimpeachable source Who will not be moved nor mocked forever. And
Who loves us beyond measure.
As no less than Jesus Christ
Himself said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
Thank you.
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