Under the guise of constitutional rights and freedom of expression, the floodgates of filth and perversion have opened wide to unleash a torrent of explicit pornography and lurid erotica. The latest perverse twist the porn barons are milking for all its worth is a booming multimillion-dollar child-pornography industry. Young children are being recruited for every degenerate act imaginable, with special emphasis on incest and pedophilia (adult-child sexual relations). It is time for all decent people to wake up from lethargy and see that pornography is far from the so-called "victimless crime" that some professors of social behavior claim. Some liberal intellectuals want to dress up all this moral garbage in a tuxedo and sell us the idea that depravity and perversion can be "socially redeeming" or beneficial to some people. Those who condone porn, moreover, assert that it has no proven deleterious effect on the human mind that can be clearly tied to the cause of certain social crimes, perverted sex acts or emotional disturbances. Unfortunately, the experience of many police or law enforcement personnel who have caught savage sex criminals with rooms full of pornography could tell you a different story. Are we supposed to believe that pornography has no adverse effect on people when we know that great works of art and literature have had a very profound beneficial effect on people? Our whole educational system is based on the concept that printed matter does influence human minds. Far from being harmless, pornography corrodes the very pillars of civilization. It is a rot that destroys not only personal morals, but stable family structure. Wherever it is permitted to take deep root, it breeds criminal vice and violence. Physically, we are what we eat. And mentally, emotionally and spiritually, each of our minds is what it feeds upon. Feed it compassion, love, respect and concern for others and you create a more civilized person or society. Feed it hatred, violence, sexual permissiveness and you wind up with a total self-loving society, with unconcern for the needs and welfare of others. Make no mistake about it, pornography teaches powerful lessons. It teaches that the highest values are the immediate personal, animalistic pleasures and urges that enter the human mind. It teaches that sex is to be used without control, and then people are to be casually abandoned. When mingled with violence, pornography advocates harming others for the sake of violence — and enjoying it. Like heroin, it demands ever more brutal or perverse acts to give its sick adherents "kicks." The porn industry knows no limits, no controls. And that is the very essence of social anarchy! Recently, an astute associate professor of law at a Midwestern university wrote in the National Observer: "Some say, 'The best way to deal with pornography is to let it run its course; once sated, people will get bored with it.' This is something like saying the best way to deal with the filth of Lake Erie is to let Lake Erie fill up until it can't take any more. Why should parents have to let their children's moral environment get so corrupt that by comparison Sodom and Gomorrah resemble a Trappist monastery?" It's as stupid as pouring gasoline on a fire to put it out! The millions who plunge headlong into pornography — soft core, hard core, whatever — are ruining their chances of being decent and trust-worthy citizens, as well as robbing themselves of the opportunity for a normal, wholesome sex and family life. Pornography a "victimless crime"? What a hoax! Society already is paying a heavy price for permitting pornography to proliferate. Who's guilty for the popularity of porn? The public for catering to and making such perversion profitable; public officials for not having the guts to pass or enforce laws that restrict the spread of pornography; the courts and our entire legal system for letting the porn barons off the hook with light sentences or fines, and twisting our constitutional freedoms in the first place in order to legalize such activities; clerics for succumbing to secular moral relevancy and refusing to spell out clearly to their parishioners the lesson about how God deals with nations going the way of Sodom and Gomorrah (see II Peter 2:6). What new taboos will the porn industry seek to break next? Whatever it is, we can't afford it. Pornography is a threat to any decent and law-abiding civilization. If we don't stop the proliferation of pornography in our homes or communities, it will not only destroy them, but our whole nation!
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