September 15, 2003Pornography Awareness Week Set for Oct.
By Terry Phillips, correspondent
It's the dirty little secret some families overlook or consciously ignore. Someone in the household is hooked — not on drugs, or alcohol — but on porn.
Pornography is the scourge of the Information Age. The Internet makes hardcore sleaze as available as weather forecasts. A click can take you, your spouse or your kids into smut not even imagined 10 years ago.
Now there is a way to fight back — Pornography Awareness Week, which is scheduled for the last week of October.
More than 150 organizations and individuals put their names on a petition asking President Bush to use his bully pulpit and declare a "fight against filth" by proclaiming Oct. 26 to Nov. 1 as National Pornography Awareness Week.
"If he does that, the primary focus of the week . . . will deal with the adult obscenity problem," said Robert Peters, president of Morality in Media, the group taking the lead by organizing National Awareness of Pornography Week. The week is part of Morality in Media's White Ribbon Against Pornography Campaign, or WRAP.
"The greatest harm that pornography does is to family life," Peters said. "Pornography damages, and very often destroys, a marriage."
Michael McManus, founder of the group Marriage Savers, said one-half of America's horrific divorce rate has a tie to pornography.
"That is a stunning number to me," McManus said. "Whether that's the core issue or not, the man becomes sexually aroused only by the pornography."
That means that while the media dwells on the scandalous effects of porn — rape or homosexual abuse of children by the clergy — your typical family man isn't immune from getting hooked on porn.
"If he genuinely becomes consumed with pornography, which a significant number of men do, how can there be anything left over for the wife?" Peters asked.
Even some pastors have become addicted to pornography.
Added McManus: "If it's a problem for them, just think what it is for average men."
Many porn-fighters blame the extent of the current problem on the Justice Department because a former attorney general and the FBI did not treat pornography and obscenity as major crime problems. Interestingly, a number of FBI agents signed the current letter.
Note that they also get their digs on the Clinton Admin, too.
What would YOU, the Discerning ILE reader, do for a Pr0n Awareness Week? Should we petition the U.S. Admin to get this week recognized as an official, federal holiday, so that we may all "get off" work that week, to further our own personal awareness? Would KaZaa be able to handle the "load"?
― Kingfish (Kingfish), Thursday, 18 September 2003 15:59 (twenty-two years ago)