Here ya go - Ron "The Hedgehog" Jeremy:
Hey, you did ask for it!
Posted on 11/19/2004 3:07:51 PM PST by Lindykim
Porn Like Heroin in the Brain by Stuart Shepard, correspondent
Senate committee discusses pornography and the First Amendment.
Experts on pornography's effects on brain chemistry testified at a Senate hearing this week where a key point of discussion was whether porn is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment or addictive material that should be unlawful.
Psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover described how pornography is analogous to cigarettes, noting that "it is a very carefully designed delivery system for evoking a tremendous flood within the brain of endogenous opioids." It's time, he added, to stop regarding it as simply a form of expression. "Modern science," Satinover said, "allows us to understand that the underlying nature of an addiction to pornography is chemically nearly identical to a heroin addiction."
Dr. Mary Anne Layden with the Center for Cognitive Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania explained how a pornographic image is burned into the brain's pathways.
"That image is in your brain forever," she explained. "If that was an addictive substance, you, at any point for the rest of your life, could in a nanosecond draw it up."
Dr. Judith Reisman, president of the Institute for Media Education, called on the Senate to take action against pornography, saying it's time to mandate that law enforcement begin to collect all data and pornographic materials found in the possession of anyone involved in criminal activity. Doing so, she added, would yield data showing whether pornography is being used as a how-to manual for sex crimes.
"The evidence the panelists presented showed an overwhelming harm from pornography," said Daniel Weiss, media and sexuality analyst with Focus on the Family. He hopes the Senate will turn the evidence into action.
TAKE ACTION/FOR MORE INFORMATION If you think Congress should be taking serious action against pornography, you can start by thanking Sen. Sam Brownback for calling the hearing, then contact your representatives in Congress and let them know what you think. For help in contacting your elected representatives, please see our CitizenLink Action Center.
Also, to learn more about one person's struggles with pornography, we suggest the resource "An Affair of the Mind: One Woman's Courageous Battle to Salvage Her Family From the Devastation of Pornography." Author Laurie Hall shares her courageous struggle to protect herself and two children from her husband's addiction to pornography.
I would have replied that to place such hazardous materials on a gas stove like that shows a little screw loose in her thinking...and that you are thinking of consulting professional help for her...then show her business cards of a marriage counselor, a psychiatrist and a divorce lawyer...time to up-end her world just a little bit I think!
Tell her you know that you could live with almost nothing but you know that she can't...then shut up and walk out the door....let that comment linger for a while.
Don't for get what that verse in proverbs also says..."better to live on a roof in the rain(or better the "drip drip of the rain" depending on the translation) than to live with a contentious woman!"
I thought this thread went inactive last night, You guy's should have pinged me to the battle. Great points and comments! Fight the good fight!
The pornography or obscene material around when I was a kid (all I ever saw was a few issues of Playboy) is nothing compared to either the content or the omnipresence of porn today.
The situations cannot be compared.
Here ya go - Ron "The Hedgehog" Jeremy:
Hey, you did ask for it!
The alternate world is Planet Zorlon.
Then you missed my main point, ie, you have no statistical evidence that porn leads to sex crimes.
Sex crimes related to porn could easily be increasing while the number of non-porn related sex crimes decreases simultaneously for unrelated reasons.
I think you are going to have a hard time making that case with the large drop:
Since 1993, rapes have declined by 60%; attempted rapes by 71.4%; and sexual assaults by 37.5%, according to NCVS figures.
Do you have anything to support a porn related increase in sex crimes in such large numbers as to overcome overall drops of 60%, 71%, and 37.5%?
My point is more philosopical and not dependent merely on one statistic. Simply put, pornography and easy access to it is part-and-parcel of a culture of moral decay. Part of the result of this is an increase in sexual promiscuity and a corresponding rise in venereal disease.
I'll accept your premise that STD's have risen as porn has become more widespread, so to speak.
You can show a correlation between porn and STD, but not causality.
IOW, I think you're trying to make a causal case but are ignoring all the caveats in your prior paragraph. For example, why couldn't nonporn related STDs be increasing very fast and porn related STDs be falling?
And never mind the reliability of what are porn and nonporn related sex crimes and STDs.
Yawn. Even if that were true (and I've read a lot about serial killers, there are other things that are linked to serial killing more strongly than porn), you're making the mistake of confusing correlation with causation.
Which is more likely: That porn makes people serial killers (consider that millions of Americans enjoy porn and don't go killing people), or that the same extreme obsessive-compulsive "twist" that makes someone want to repeatedly rape and kill people also makes them use porn to feed their compulsion between opportunities to kill?
snip...when their daughters show up between the pages, they should just STFU
Yes, if it was their daughter, son, wife, sister, or brother being used and exloited like a slab of meat they would feel and think differently.
snip...I denounce the whole damn phenemonen of making personal choice irrelevant. It is a farce, and a stream of thought that is fraudulent and needs to be destroyed
"Personal choices" as 'rights' is the destructive farce parading as this thing called 'democracy'.
First, America is a Constitutional Republic and not a 'mob-rule' democracy, and peronal choice is nothng but how one 'feels' {emotionally} about something. And emotions unleashed from moral ethics are destructive and illogical. Thus it is illogical to claim that pornography, which is nothing more than dark sexual fantasies on celluloid, is somehow or another a freedom of speech issue. Dark sexual fantasies, while definitely a 'personal issue' should not be aired in public. Only a selfish citizenry reduced to "thinking" with their gonads would consider such a thing as a 'personal right."
I said "originalist". Madison's Commerce Clause, not FDR's.
James Madison to Joseph C. Cabell
13 Feb. 1829
Letters 4:14--15
For a like reason, I made no reference to the "power to regulate commerce among the several States." I always foresaw that difficulties might be started in relation to that power which could not be fully explained without recurring to views of it, which, however just, might give birth to specious though unsound objections. Being in the same terms with the power over foreign commerce, the same extent, if taken literally, would belong to it. Yet it is very certain that it grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government, in which alone, however, the remedial power could be lodged.
I don't know how old you are but there was hard core porn with all the nasty stuff in even 30 and 40 years ago, even longer. Then there were the dirty books I ran across in the bathroom my dad inadvertantly left out...
You miss my point...if you reach a point that you start actually seeking out this type of filth, then you are in trouble. But to have run across it at various points in your life in ways that you had nothing to do with it, even if you remeber it, isn't the thing that defiles you.
"Wrong! That is a huge jump in rationale. Pornography is immoral. Christianity is not. Of course you might just be paranoid. Or perhaps you have other reasons for opposing this."
Hi. Perhaps you need a quick course in jurisprudence 101.
Pay attention:
The 14th Amendmane guarantees equal protection under the law. The USSC has ruled multiple times that this also means equal prosecution.
And we live in a land where judicial precedent is on a higher footing than legislative law.
So: When one person gets their rights restrained for one form of speech you open the door to restraining other forms of speech that fit the same judicial parameters. That is equal protection under the law.
Get your head out of the sand and learn about your government before you go calling people names.
"If porn's affects were strictly affecting just the viewer, perhaps you would be right. But porn also affects those who participate in it including under-age children. Plus porn seems to induce a few more unstable individules onto more vile and even murderous activities (a la Ted Bundy).!"
On your first point you are making an illogical argument: it is already illegal to use children in pornography. Banning pornography will not make that more illegal than it already is as child pornography is not legal anywhere in the USA.
Your second argument is also without merit. If everything must be banned because a "few more unstable individules" may be unduly influenced than I do trust you support banning television, radio, newspapers, and Free Republic because any law that gets past a First Amendment protection will open the door to other forms of speech being limited by the same artifice.
Bear in mind here I do NOT support pornography. But I would rather be able to argue against it than to have my right to free speech somehow limited by the same legal argument that would successfully breach the 1st Amendment to ban pornography. It CAN happen.
No more true of porn than of any other exciting activity, e.g., skydiving or bungee-jumping. Guess porn-banning "conservatives" will go after those activities next.
EEK! That is a horrible vision.
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