Why Get Rid of Pornography In Your Community?
People fight visible enemies. People fight pornography for these reasons:
Healthy Relationships
Meaningful long-lasting fulfilling relationships are based on love, not lust. They are worth fighting - watch this video journey.
Economics
Where there are peep show booths, adult bookstores, adult theaters, sexually oriented businesses and hard core pornography in neighborhood video stores, simply put:
- The crime rate goes up; economic values go down.
- The rape rate goes up; the tone of commerce goes down.
- Child molestation rates go up; the quality of life goes down.
- Economic blight increases; property values decrease.
- Prostitution, assault, robbery increases; growth decreases.
Police costs increase–to monitor out of control behavior in blighted areas where sexually oriented businesses thrive–dollars your city could better spent elsewhere.
Those who are addicted to pornography and the sexual acting out it fosters, spend money for sexual gratification their families need. Community tax dollars, welfare, and donated dollars are required to care for abused or neglected family members of addicts.
Organized crime–a multi-billion dollar, unregulated business that receives much of the money from pornography.
Public Safety and Health
Pornography promotes unsafe sex and sexual behavior that fosters or enables the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Peep show booths and “adult” theatres are simply masturbation parlors or locations where illegal sexual intercourse occurs. They promote disease; public health and safety are imperiled.
Rape, child molestation, and other aggressive sexual behavior is both related to and promoted by pornography. This is especially true for violent pornography, particularly that which portrays the myth that women enjoy rape and other myths that molesters believe. The safety of families is at risk from daily users of hard core pornography, who tend to act out sexually.
Mental Health and Education
Pornography is a sex education teacher of children and adolescents, and a poor one at that.
The age group which reports the most frequent viewing is the group between 12-17 years of age. This age group is most likely to be negatively affected by exposure to pornography, especially if: it is violent; if the exposure is at the younger ages; and the exposure results in a “peak experience” or a highly arousing experience.
Children and adolescents, unless taught in caring, systematic ways will believe that the abnormal or aberrant behavior depicted in pornography is really normal. They will grow up with unrealistic, often morbid, ideas of what to expect from sexual relationships. Up to age 12, values are still being formed.
This is extremely harmful to the mental health of young people and is one of the predisposing or preconditioning factors which lead to sexual disorders, deviance or dysfunctions. It cannot help but cause unstable marriages, increase divorce rates and prevent the very social intimacy that young people and adults need.
Sexual molesters and rapists feed on hard core pornography and the myths pornography portrays. Many molested children later in life become molesters as well. Rape victims are usually so traumatized by both the rape and the callous inquisitors they deal with after the rape that their mental health is greatly–often permanently–affected. Our mental health centers and rape crisis centers cannot keep pace with the increasing numbers of victims. Abused women, children, and men are our neighbors and will affect our community’s overall mental health. Somebody will pay for that!
Children are especially vulnerable to the messages of pornography, especially hard core pornography.
- They do not know reality from fantasy,
- They do not have the experience to balance the untruth (distortions) they see portrayed in pornography
- They are more likely to imitate the behavior they see. They do not have their values formed to resist, or to say “NO.”
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 1984–observation of TV violence causes actual aggression in children.
Rape by youth under 18 has been on the rise, according to the FBI.
Civil Rights - Human Rights
We spend millions to bring out the best in our citizens, to nurture and develop our finest qualities. Pornography appeals to the prurient interest. It touches the dark side in us. It brings out the worst in us. It promotes the degradation of women. It is an intolerable, unacceptable, social stigma. It is wrong culturally and morally for the promulgation of dehumanizing propaganda to be unregulated. It is immoral to treat women as objects for sale and for use and abuse. Women are not playthings. No society that tolerates, let alone condones or promotes, the selective abuse of women and children can call itself good. It is breeding decadence and self-destruction. It is just not the right thing to do.
It Is Illegal
Hard-core obscenity and child pornography are illegal. The U.S. Supreme Court has unequivocally stated that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment.