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.
Naw, I just didn't want to waste my time rebutting hackneyed cliches. But, I'll do so now.
But porn has been shown to harm the public at large, reducing its performers to little more than sex objects who are often abused and hooked on drugs.
The first part of your statement is not true, unless you can cite some evidence to back this claim. The second part of your statement is irrelevant. Adults have the right to consent to be degraded for money. Again, no rights are harmed.
The national discourse has become coursened, it's fine musical traditions cheapened by so called artists who push moral toleration to the bleeding edge.
Name a right that has been harmed by this.
The evidence of the corrosive effect of porn on our nation is all around us
An assertion backed by no evidence.
Porn harms all rights by chipping away at the morality and religion that suports those rights(as Washington argued!)
Porn does not do anything. Porn is an inanimate object. It cannot make anyone do anything. People chip away at morality and religion by their own actions. However, you have still to show how a consenting adult viewing pornography in private harms morality and religion.
See my comment above to Modern man. I call forcing pornography on every community regardless of whether they want it or not jack booted thuggism.
Even if you do not agree with Singer's particular fetishes, and only support the ones your mind has decided are worthy of your stamp of approval, you are on the same team. Why? Because your philosophy of life - your world view - is the same. He's just taken it to the natural conclusion, while you hold back wimpily.
I know, you don't choose to watch porn, just support the rights of masturbators all over the world. Just like people who want drugs legalized - none of THEM use, they just support the rights of others to get wasted legally.
Porn is not forced on any state, city, community, county, town and unicorporated rural area. Those areas are not required to provide porn, subsidize it or even allow its consumption in public. Rather, those entities are only required to not pass laws that would prevent consenting adults from viewing, producing or buying pornography.
and removing any legal option for such communities to prohibit the sale, distribution, manufacture or dissemination of pornography - is removing the power of government?
Yes. What is unclear to you? Since the government entities you mentioned above have less power to regulate what people read, view, produce or sell, that is a limitation of government power.
It is using the jack boot of government to limit the rights of individuals.
Individuals have every right not to produce, star in, buy, sell or view pornography. However, government does not have the power to tell consenting adults not to do these things. So, if you agree that this is the current status quo, please tell me what individual rights are limited?
Regarding comparing guns to porn - the right to protect oneself against enemies to the right to masturbate over pictures of whores prostituting themselves? These are not in the same category whatsoever, and it is laughable that you can compare them.
Rights are rights. The right to view or read what one wants is no less important than the right to bear arms. Just because you don't like what certain people view or read doesn't change this fact.
Rights are rights. What about the right of two men to marry each other? Maybe the founders were wrong about that one. What about the right of adults to have sex with children? Maybe they got that one wrong too. What about the right to have all schoolchildren screened for mental illness? Maybe that's a right they didn't know about.
And on and on and on.
If someone such as yourself refuses to admit the necessity of moral absolutes, you are on a very slippery slope, because there is always someone further along than yourself, such as Peter Singer (unless you agree with his natural conclusions to your philosophy) leading the way with his Pied Piper lies.
No moral absolutes - looks very good on paper. But it leads to cattle cars, gas chambers, and the Gulag. You don't see this because of your blinders - your blinders of hatred towards God and His laws. But He gives us all freedom of choice. We are free to make bad choices. But we are not free from the very serious consequences of our bad choices.
No one could ever call me a "fundamentalist Christian" - I read the Bible and the Vedas. All religions have the same basic moral absolutes. The problem is the tiny minority of atheists want to shove atheism down everyones' throats. You don't have that right.
You want the right to make up the rules to suit your proclivities. But you don't see that there are bigger dogs wanting to shove stuff down your throat that you don't like. But by rejecting moral absolutes, you have nothing to defend yourselve against their agenda.
Peter Singer thinks useless old people should be killed. What will you say when that is the law of the land, and you're a useless old person? With the rejection of moral absolutes, the biggest dog gets to make the rules.
The first two "rights" you mentioned have no basis in the Constitution nor can seriously be argued to be inalienable rights. So, they're a strawman. The third "right" you mention is actually a question of whether government has the power to do such a thing (maybe, maybe not) and whether parents have the right to refuse such a thing (maybe, maybe not).
Whatever the status of these three strawmen "rights," they are quite different from the Constitutionally-recognized inalienable right of a person to read or view whatever they want, so long as no one else is harmed.
If someone such as yourself refuses to admit the necessity of moral absolutes What makes you think I refuse to recognize moral absolutes? For the record, I subscribe to the notion that the only things that are moral for a person to do are things that do not harm the person or property of a nonconsenting other. I might disagree with your definition as to what constitutes moral absolutes, but that does not mean that I do not believe that there are such things as moral absolutes.
The problem is the tiny minority of atheists want to shove atheism down everyones' throats. You don't have that right.
As I've noted several times, I have no desire to shove anything down your throat. When it comes to pornography my position is clear: the only legal way for pornography to be used is by consenting adults in private. You seem to think I want to come to your home and make you read Hustler. That's just nutty.
You, on the other hand, seem to want to use government power to regulate what consensual activities I engage in in private.
That's not the argument; the argument is that "accepted morality" doesn't include using force to make others avoid immoral acts that violate no rights.
I favor allowing communities to decide for or against porn. (But I fail to see how porn sold under reasonable zoning restrictions and away-from-kids rules would be "forced" on anyone.)
Are those crickets I hear?
Repinging you to this ongoing thread. Some valid arguments have been made, and many invalid ones.
It breaks down to (a) there are moral absolutes or (b) there aren't. If there aren't, then as I said in a post above, the big dog gets to make the rules.
Rights are rights. What about the right of two men to marry each other? Maybe the founders were wrong about that one. What about the right of adults to have sex with children? Maybe they got that one wrong too. What about the right to have all schoolchildren screened for mental illness? Maybe that's a right they didn't know about.
The first two "rights" you mentioned have no basis in the Constitution nor can seriously be argued to be inalienable rights. So, they're a strawman. The third "right" you mention is actually a question of whether government has the power to do such a thing (maybe, maybe not) and whether parents have the right to refuse such a thing (maybe, maybe not).
Whatever the status of these three strawmen "rights," they are quite different from the Constitutionally-recognized inalienable right of a person to read or view whatever they want, so long as no one else is harmed.
If someone such as yourself refuses to admit the necessity of moral absolutes
What makes you think I refuse to recognize moral absolutes? For the record, I subscribe to the notion that the only things that are moral for a person to do are things that do not harm the person or property of a nonconsenting other. I might disagree with your definition as to what constitutes moral absolutes, but that does not mean that I do not believe that there are such things as moral absolutes.
The problem is the tiny minority of atheists want to shove atheism down everyones' throats. You don't have that right.
As I've noted several times, I have no desire to shove anything down your throat. When it comes to pornography my position is clear: the only legal way for pornography to be used is by consenting adults in private. You seem to think I want to come to your home and make you read Hustler. That's just nutty.
You, on the other hand, seem to want to use government power to regulate what consensual activities I engage in in private.
Legalization of porn - which happened by the threesome of the ACLU, leftist activist judges, and the porn industry, NOT by our elected representatives (keep this in mind) mandates that the various states, counties, cities and so on have no right to limit or restrict porn. They have a few little rights like porn shops can't be located within a certain number of feet from schools, or underage kids can't go buy it in "adult" shops.
But with porn all over the internet, it is inevitable that kids are exposed to it. And a certain number of adults who indulge are then more likely to seek out children or adolescents as sex partners.
Another point is that by legalizing porn, the sexual content of all media including advertising is "dumbed down". We see yearly that explicit sexual content is more and more pervasive. The amorality crowd think this is fine, but it is not.
They (you?) say that if someone does't want porn in their life, they don't have to access it. That's the same arugment abortion proponents say - if you don't like abortion, don't have one.
When we turn our culture into a garbage dump, the stench, flies and rats are everywhere, they can't be avoided.
24.Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural and healthy."
This is the Gramscian agenda of the "long march through the institutions" spelled out explicitly: gradual takeover of the "means of communication" and then using those vehicles to debauch the culture and weaken the will of the individual to resist.
Today those few who still have the courage to advocate public morality are denounced and viciously attacked. Most Americans are entirely unwitting regarding the motives behind this agenda.
I am NOT a Communist.
That said, I rank this list of Communist goals right up there with the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in terms of credibility.
Both feature similar grammar and syntax and since both appeared in the 1930's they are probably from the same author.
Again, I am also not a proponent of porn.
My concern is that if we give the current liberal judiciary a weapon against free speech that is Constitutional then they will inevitably find a way to pervert it and use it against us.
Do you see where I'm going here? My concern is the very same people you are concerned about.
Let us get the government back in the hands of decent, God-fearing, conservative & patriotic people before we give it a weapon to restrict speech.
heroine sounds like fun, I'll be sure to stick it in the vcr at the next bachelor party.
Try again. 1), I'm not a liberal, so drop the name calling. 2), I support the war on drugs. Drugs and pornography are not equivocal.
That's really what this comes down to, isn't it? You want to crush every thought that stems from a different fountain.
Oh come on, can you be any more dramatic? "Force porn on every community"??? Please! You make it sound as though whole communities are forced to sit down and watch hours upon hours of copulation based programming against their will. I would laugh if I didn't know that you were deadly serious in your beliefs.
Modernman, you speak of gov'ts 'proper role", which is to 'protect the rights" of people. Either our rights are the 'reasoned' extension of transcendant moral law, as are the secular laws themselves, or our rights and our laws are nothing but the willow-the-wisp creations of whatever man or group of men who happen to be in control want them to be.
Under the first scenario, porn is a moral wrong because first and formost it reduces, debases, depersonalizes, and objectifies human beings in order that they can be made use of by other human beings. This wrongful attitude has given rise throughout history to slavery and even worse, to cannibalism. When one 'uses' porn, he/she is in fact 'using' the objectified body of another human being. The "censual argument" is nothing but a cop out. To hide behind that argument is to say......"it isn't my fault that I made use of that human being as though they were an object......it's her/his fault for letting me do it."
Under the latter scenario, wherein secular man makes laws and rights according to personal whims/tastes, not only will porn be viewed as a "right", but eventually so too will sex with children, with animals.....in fact, whatever powerful man wants, he will take/do.
So your argument boils down to this: it isn't my fault when I derpersonalize/objectify another human being in order that I can slake my personal dark sexual fantasies upon that body, it's the fault of the "driverless" body {objectified human being} for consenting to allow me to do it.
Furthermore, it's my "right" {freedom of speech} to objectify/depersonalize other human beings when I feel a {sexualized} urge to do so."
But it is the arguement in our country...an arguement that people are avoiding. In order to allow free speech for every perversion under the sun, Christians are being told to essentially "sear" there own consciences by accepting the premise that free speech also protects their rights to speak/assemble as well.
Men are truly free only when they act within the dictates of their own God regenerated consciences. There-fore Christians are going to find themselves increasingly under attack as they face the choices as to whether they should wilt under that assault or whether they should stand firm against the libertine excesses occuring in this nation.
The thought consciousness that allows for porn in the first place is decidedly anti-religious and anti morality. It does not allow for Religious free expression, (as the motive for the push for "Hate speech/crimes legislation" would denote). You've seen the movements on many college campuses to stifle the religious rights of students while allowing for every crass leftist idea and pornographic perversion. Democrats are openly pushing such hate speech legislation as a means of marginalizing the religious conservatives and tamping down their influence in the elections.
The 18th century framers never envisioned the envelope being pushed this far with respect to the 1st amendment. Washington stated that "Religion and morality" were the "twin props on which our liberty rests"(of the 18th century fashion by which he meant "religion and morality). He knew that it was the moral consensus of a nation's people that would keep societal factionalism in check. When you have a break-down in consensus, the nation becomes weak and disunited.
So to the question I keep asking..."Did the founding fathers intend for the first amendment to be stripped of all moral/religious coloration of the 18th century that influenced its adoption into our constitution?"
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