Saturday, April 21, 2007

Gonzalez vs. the Porn Industry?

Interesting article over at Catholic Online, which raises the question as to whether the firings of eight US Attorneys had something to do with a crackdown on porn.

Here is an excerpt:


“In a move popular with anti-porn groups and the religious right, Gonzales had made a renewed war on porn one of the top priorities of the Department of Justice,” wrote Mark Follman, in a Salon.com article that blames the firing of U.S. attorneys on a new federal crusade against porn.

But lax obscenity enforcement, said a former porn prosecutor for the Reagan administration, has resulted in unbridled availability of porn – on cell phones, computers, cable television and in hotel rooms everywhere – that’s fundamentally changing American culture.

“Our children and our college students are consuming a steady diet of obscene material,” said Patrick Truman, an assistant attorney general under Ronald Reagan who headed the Child Exploitation and Obscenity section of the Department of Justice.

“The mainstream porn industry has been left to do pretty much whatever it wants,” he said. “Porn is now so pervasive that our college students don’t even know how to date, because pornography has conditioned young men to believe that they’re entitled to sexual services from women without the need for relationship. They’re on such a steady diet of porn that they can’t distinguish between love and sexual desire.”



I couldn't agree more. It was, indeed, an appropriate time for Pope Benedict to give us the encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, in which he explores true love and contrasts that with false love. This will someday be looked upon as one of the greatest documents ever written once younger generations begin to absorb the beauty of it.

The entire article was well worth reading.

Go read Critics suggest U.S. attorney firings were linked to anti-porn crackdown at Catholic Online (note that there are two pages to the article)


SIDENOTE:

I am still working on the draft version of the Altar Boy Program - Post 3, and will publish it in the coming days. I'm taking my time with it.