Conservatives Finding New Ways To Surrender (On Porn)

Conservatives Finding New Ways To Surrender (On Porn)

Somebody had the good idea to say “Ban Porn” on Twitter the other day. If there was anything non-controversial for “conservatives” you’d think it would be this.

Porn is debilitating, addicting, poisonous, unhealthy, harmful in every way. It has no redeeming benefits. We all wish we never seen any of it. At least, this is what I wish, having had too much easy access to it in years past. Once you break yourself of it, you can see how evil it is.

The one question everybody asks: Why is it free?

Answering that question may be one reason Conservative Inc. reacted so violently against commonsense. They were appalled at the notion that the should government step in and do its job and enforce the obscenity laws already on the books.

“Ban porn?” they screamed. “Then we’ll have to ban booze, Pop Tarts and Pencils! If you don’t want your cellphone-holding 10-year-old to watch porn, be a better parent!” A typical response is from The Federalist’s Ben Domenech, who said “Are the conservatives who think they can ban porn online purposefully ignoring the massive expansion of government this would require, or are they too stupid to realize it?”

We await only the NRO’s hot take “The Conservative Case For Porn.”

It was impossible to keep these cruise-ship conservatives on point. They have convinced themselves that porn is a “right”, and that, anyway, even if it isn’t, we don’t dare unleash government lest government go on a banning spree. As if that isn’t what the government has been doing anyway.

I don’t want to make this article about porn. It’s about the fecklessness of so-called conservatives. But before we leave the topic, the Twitter fracas was responsible for this:

https://twitter.com/JoeySalads/status/1204161012766785537

If you can’t see the tweet, it is by one Joey “Salads” Saladino who is running for Congress in “conservative” Staten Island. He boasted “I will protect your porn.”

What a sad culture!

Now I know it’s the anti-Christian New York Times, but we need to hear from them because they managed to dig up another Conservative Inc. person to write “Christian Doomsayers Have Lost It“. We, dear readers are the doomsayers. This Peter Wehner thinks Christians should be happy. After all, abortions are down! (Though perversion is way up, thus pregnancies down.) So why have Christians “given their full-throated support to President Trump”?

Wehner seems to remember there might have been a worse alternative, that Trump “is by far the lesser of two evils.” But immediately after supplying the sane and true answer, he discards it and dispenses with warm anecdotes of Hillary.

And then begins complaining we aren’t nice.

Sohrab Ahmari — a convert to Catholicism who is both the op-ed editor of The New York Post and a contributor to the religious magazine First Things — was so outraged that drag queens were reading stories to children at a library in Sacramento that he has relegated civility to a secondary virtue while turning against modernity and classical liberalism.

Ahmari spends most of his time in the Conservative Inc. camp, so it was gratifying that he spoke out against perverts on the prowl for kids. Civility is not the answer. This is war. Aharmi sometimes sees this. Whener not at all.

To my fellow Christians, then, a friendly reminder from a conservative who shares many of your concerns: We are not living in Nero’s Rome. In world history, there are very few nations that have been as accommodating to Christianity as the United States is today; and America is hardly on the edge of a moral abyss.

Backwards, Whener. It should be Christians accommodating non-Christians, not the other way around.

I’ll agree with him about one thing: we’re not at the edge of a moral abyss. We’re up to our throats in one, and sinking fast. Yet Whener needs to think things are good so he can pin the blame for all ills on Trump.

As if Trump ultimately means anything. Unless our orange boss declares martial law, dissolves the Senate, and rules with an iron rod, Trump is wholly incidental. Even card-carrying Conservative Inc. member and NRO denizen Michael Brendan Dougherty can see this.

Why can’t Whener? Instead he says this: “Jesus didn’t view the world primarily as a battle zone. Neither should we.”

This is the danger of reading Bibles a the New York Times offices. Lord only knows what has been expurgated. Like the bit where our Lord says “Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword.”

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28 Comments

  1. In 50 years (or less?) these same conservatives will be defending Abortion*

    *unless something changes. Nothing stays the same forever.

  2. Gail Finke

    Our collective inability to argue, follow logic, or research — combined with our age’s emotivism — has left many “conservatives” defaulting to libertarianism, but without the knowledge base of actual libertarians. They mistake any use of government with tyranny, all but the most basic of laws as tyranny, and any restraint on any behavior as tyranny. That’s not liberty, it’s libertinism. And as the weird dust-up about pornography shoes, even those who aren’t obvious addicts (generally shown by their near-hysterical anger at the very idea of not being able to view porn), the general understanding of what free speech means and why we have it has been eroded uselessness. IMHO, some of that is the result of purposeful action (decades of court cases designed to create this outcome) and some comes from American orneriness (not wanting to be told what to do) run amok. But, like abortion, this reveals that in our day many people truly view sexual perversion, sexual license, and the complete lack of consequences of such are what they will fight to the mat for (in the name of liberty, of course). What a sad commentary on how we view our lives.

  3. Sheri

    “We are not living in Nero’s Rome.” I beg to differ. The fiddles are loud and drowning everything out. The writer is DEAF.

    Of course Jesus viewed the world as a battle zone. Otherwise, his existence would have been pointless. The battle was/is good versus evil.

    If the New York Times understood the Bible, it would be a sign of end times…..

  4. Vandicus

    There are several concerns I’d like to bring up regarding an effort to ban porn.

    1. That chick porn(largely literature) will be disregarded even though it is the more serious problem. Men will rarely divorce their wives because of unrealistic expectations driven by porn, women will frequently do so(having an absurd understanding of what marriage is like and what they should expect in men). Moreover they will divorce their husbands over porn use(the rate of divorce is higher among Christians in regards to porn-use than non-Christians). There is a risk that a political movement to ban porn will be co-opted and used simply to bash men.

    2. There is the temptation to disregard the more serious problems, divorce, adultery, perversion and invest in a moral crusade as a form of virtue signalling. Divorce might well increase as virtuous harlots divorce their husbands for porn use. Divorce is the far more serious illness, both on the personal level and societal one. Porn(at least male use of porn) tends more to be a symptom than a cause. First age of marriage for men is now about 30 in the US, and that’s not due to excessively high standards or unwillingness to marry. That men would prefer the real thing(which is largely unavailable to them) should not be in doubt.

    3. Who would administer this? The bureaucracy is overwhelmingly left-wing, and will always trend such. One might note that the government itself seems to be the largest purveyor of child porn(the FBI does such things in the name of ‘catching the real criminals’, funny how Epstein seemed to evade them for so long). There is a serious and reasonable concern about how actionable a ban would be.

    While the movement certainly discourages sin and encourages self-improvement, hopefully helping out many, I would wager that material advancement of the cause would coincide with it being corrupted.

  5. Dave

    “Why is it free?”

    Porn is free, or very cheap, for the same reason potatoes are: Porn creates more porn. Teenage girls watch porn on the internet and say, “That looks like great fun! Where do I sign up? Oh, click here.”

    Girls may consume less porn, but it affects them more. No amount of porn could make me lust for inked-up old whores with too much makeup and giant silicone tits, but girls imprint on heavily-tattooed street-thug porn mooks and lose all desire for men who could plausibly support a family.

  6. DAV

    In my experience, the best way to get more of what you don’t want is to ban it.

  7. Dave

    Vandicus is correct. Any attempt to regulate male sexual expression while letting female lust run wild can only accelerate the collapse of white fertility as women choose virile street thugs over good Christian men. So dies any church that fails to keep its women in meek obedience.

    The decline may be so far advanced that we shall either succumb to the barbarians or become the barbarians. If Christian men called out street thugs as Satan-worshippers and publicly dismembered them with swords and axes, as our forebears did in the Middle Ages, wayward women would come back to Jesus right quick.

  8. Kent Clizbe

    “Like the bit where our Lord says ‘Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but the sword.'”

    Careful. Following the precepts can get your religion branded pretty quickly: #ReligionofPeace

    Next thing you know, Hellfires screaming down the chimney–terrorism, you know.

  9. Dave

    For every Muslim killed by Hellfire missiles, a hundred have been allowed to settle in Western countries, collect welfare, turn churches into mosques, and groom white girls for sex. Our politicians have the utmost respect for religions that post beheading videos on the internet.

  10. Yonason

    @Dave

    So, basically what you’re saying is that we kill off the stupid violent ones, while the smarter more dangerous subversives slip past our security on their way to cause real and permanent harm?

    Don’t get me wrong. There are good Muslims. However, IMO, they are not good because of their religion but in spite of it.

  11. Yonason

    Ban ALL porn?

    It’s going to be an uphill battle.

    “Tasteful” (their definition, not mine) porn is deeply rooted among many Conservatives, and it goes way back. It’s virtually a military tradition. I was going to give examples of Vargas Girls as “nose art” on WWII bombers, but decided to self-censor posting it here after seeing what there was to select from.

    But the point is, you’re not going to, nor should you, win. It’s one of those “freedom of choice” issues that govt has no business butting into. Making it illegal isn’t a solution (except in the worse cases like child porn, for e.g.): and as some above have commented, it will create more problems than it will solve.

    And what about “food porn?”
    https://youtu.be/ZJRoISHdg2I
    Didn’t know you wanted one of those till you saw it, did you? So, then don’t look. But the choice should be yours, not some bureaucrat’s whose probably a pervert.

  12. Howard

    “Conservative” (within the context of American politics and culture) is one of those words that does not really mean anything, or at least not anything very definite. There is no obvious connection between “pro-business” conservatives and “cultural” conservatives, other than both hated and feared the Soviet Union (which is no longer around to unite them) and they have both historically been associated with the Republican Party. Likewise, there is no logical necessity uniting “pro-union” liberals with “sexual revolution” liberals other than a historical association with the Democratic Party. We use the word “conservative” as though it meant something more than a temporary and superficial resemblance, then we are surprised when more fundamental differences are exposed and widen; we really should not be surprised.

  13. info

    I think if porn should be defunded/stigmatized. So should female textual porn like all those romance novels that do the same thing or even worse in regards to the influence it has on women alongside what happens to men with visual porn.

    So romance novels should get the same treatment.

  14. info

    “But the point is, you’re not going to, nor should you, win. It’s one of those “freedom of choice” issues that govt has no business butting into. Making it illegal isn’t a solution (except in the worse cases like child porn, for e.g.”

    The same thing that can be used to ban child porn can be effectively applied to all porn I believe.

  15. Amateur Brain Surgeon

    Of course the establishment desires we view porn for lust darkness the intellect and one can’t both pray and masturbate and the govt does not ant any opposition to it, thus, free porn, legalised pot, and religious liberty.

    Wisdom: 18:14 For while al things were in quiet silence, and the night was in the most of her course, They almighty word leaped down from Heaven from thy royal throne, as a fierce conqueror into the midst of the land of destruction what a sharp sword carrying thy unfeigned commandment, and he stood and filed al things with death, and standing n earth, reached even to heaven.

  16. Amateur Brain Surgeon

    “Tasteful” (their definition, not mine) porn is deeply rooted among many Conservatives, and it goes way back. It’s virtually a military tradition. I was going to give examples of Vargas Girls as “nose art” on WWII bombers, but decided to self-censor posting it here after seeing what there was to select from.

    Because the atrocities of war and prostitution and pornography are normative.

    Govt should ban porn (It was the Messias-Deniers who were the driving force behind its normalisation because it was the Jews who had a monopoly on pornography) and it should regulate the insurance industry but conservatives think that anything the govt does is wrong – except wars in support of zionism

  17. Amateur Brain Surgeon

    The idolatry of liberty leads many men to support th production and consumption of porn without ever awakening to the fact that consuming porn is not liberty, it is slavery.

    Men must be taught to love the Good, The True, and The Beautiful and defending pirn is defending Satan.

    O, and why are the prostitutes (male and female ) who have themselves filmed fornicating always called stars?

  18. Yonason

    “What security checkpoint did these genetic defectives slip by?” – Kalif

    The security (I didn’t say “checkpoints,” but I’ll let that one slide) that we SHOULD have had in place. Why? To catch as many of these guys as possible.
    https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/09/muslims_of_america_terrorist_training_compounds.html
    And I did NOT call them “genetic defectives,” but “smarter more dangerous subversives.”

    “In spite of that, there are some good Christians, so we should not generalize” – Kalif

    Since the NJ shooters you refer to didn’t self-ID as Christians, why would you imply they were?
    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/12/breaking-jersey-city-shooters-identified-david-anderson-and-francine-graham-members-of-antisemitic-violent-black-hebrew-israelites-cult/

    It’s hard not to generalize in the face of the facts.
    https://thereligionofpeace.com/

    If the evidence better supported your post, you wouldn’t have to twist my words or alter any of the facts.

  19. Yonason

    @Amateur Brain Surgeon

    “Govt should ban porn…”

    You trust the perverts in govt to regulate for you what they do all the time? Seriously? That would be like expecting Bernie Sanders to fix the economy, or Adam Schiff to pass a law against telling lies. It’s just not realistic.

    Porn is a bad thing. It isn’t healthy. At least we agree on that.

  20. Kalif

    @Yonason

    Although NJ shooters didn’t self-identify as X, we all know who they are, what background they came from and how they were ‘raised’.

    Burmese didn’t self-id. as Buddhists, but we all know who filled mass graves with the bodies, and why. (well-established ‘religion of peace’, all together with yoga mats, lululemon spandex for fat ladies, tea ceremonies, Ooohm, incense, and other new-age bull-crap).

    Han Chinese don’t claim they do what they do because of Buddhism, Communism, or whatever else, but their results are conc. camps. To be fair, they have been known to harass Xians on occasion.

    Multiple genocides in various countries all over Europe, especially in Balkans since Ottoman empire vanished, have been wrapped into ‘national/ethnic/political/etc. strife’, but we all know who and why committed them, and who ended up at the shorter end of the stick.

    “…It’s hard not to generalize in the face of the facts…”
    The link you posted, ironically shows what happened in Algeria in 2007. Who do you think died in those buildings? Taoists? Confucians?

    Let’s stick to porn, which is the topic.
    Porn is not art IMO (same with taped banana), but it reflects what most people want. They are free to read fine literature instead, but they don’t. Well, same as capitalism is a reflection of the true human nature (some say), so is the porn of their artistic inclinations, etc.
    No need to regulate/ban it.
    Just like guns. Just like abortions.
    If you don’t want it, don’t watch it.

  21. Yonason

    @Kalif

    “…we all know who they are, what background they came from and how they were ‘raised’. “

    We do? I don’t. Educate me.

    “Burmese didn’t self-id. as Buddhists, but we all know who filled mass graves with the bodies, and why.”

    Well, at least they weren’t provoked by Muslims attacking them, ….oh wait.
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-hindus-idUSKCN1C21M6

    etc., etc.

    Bottom line, local conflicts that don’t involve Islamic extremists, while awful, can’t compare with a world view that doesn’t tolerate difference anywhere, and who’s assaults are global.
    Example – Just one year at random
    https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/attacks/attacks.aspx?Yr=2007
    “During this time period, there were 3096 Islamic attacks in 45 countries, in which 20495 people were killed and 27317 injured.”

    That is orders of magnitude worse than what you paint as equivalent.

    Finally, I agree. Lets do get back to the subject at hand, and yes it’s a personal choice that one shouldn’t be forced to make, but that one should train oneself to make.

    Question for those advocating banning it. In order to do that, you must first define it. How do you do that? Will it include the calendar swimsuit edition, or the scantily clad women in Mechanics Illustrated or Popular Mechanics? Movies? How about cheer leaders? And don’t forget National Geographic’s photos of various natives across the world. My point? If you can’t define it (and you can’t), then you can’t regulate it without hurting someone who shouldn’t be hurt.

  22. Gail Finke

    I cant’ tell if this is supposed to be sarcastic or not. If so, bravo, a masterpiece taking down people who think “don’t like it, don’t do it!” is a principled justification for everything from porn to actual murder.
    If not… what a hot mess of crap. I suppose if one doesn’t recognize that human nature is fallen and a lot of people always want to do bad things — whatever the culture, and whatever the political system — one can confuse political liberty with the license to live in filth and infect everyone else around you with it. But that’s no what liberty means, that’s not what capitalism means, that’s not what laws and governments are for, and to say so is a sad excuse for thought.

  23. Yonason

    “…“don’t like it, don’t do it!” is [NOT] a principled justification for everything from porn to actual murder.” – Gail Finke

    Precisely.

    Choosing to do nor not do bad things is never a neutral choice.

    With murder the harm is generally objectively quantifiable, as with many other clearly criminal acts. With looking at dirty pictures, or even defining what “dirty pictures” are, it is more subjective and hence more problematic.

    The more subjective a judgment is, the less I want some govt drone supervising it. They make enough bad judgment calls when things should be clear.

    The more unclear the damage is, the more it is the individual’s responsibility to monitor his/her own behavior. That doesn’t mean a correct choice doesn’t exist, it just puts the responsibility where it belongs.

    Also, not saying there is no role for govt prohibition whenever something should be legally prohibited (e.g., murder, child porn, arson, vandalism, theft…). But there are some things better left under the authority of one’s spiritual mentors, who if doing their job will be far more effective at preventing bad behavior than secular authorities are. IMO it’s the prevention of such bad behavior that is the ultimate goal, after all.

    NOTE – if the govt itself were on a very high moral plane, I would have no problem with them regulating moral issues. But they aren’t, and foxes shouldn’t be guarding hen houses, and perverts, liars and crooks have no business monitoring activities related to their own personal failings.

  24. Yonason

    (Classical) Porn is the least of our problems.

    As sick as society is becoming,…
    https://youtu.be/m67kmWZriFI?t=2737
    …banning porn would be like putting a band-aid on gangrene.
    (That whole program is worth watching, mostly.)

    Of course, porn probably has contributed to some (ok, a lot) of this. But, and I repeat, since it is govt that is pushing a lot of the current sexual pathology, how do we justify them deciding what to ban, and what not? Just asking for yet more trouble.

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