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Reply to "Puritan Watch"

It Was the Porn That Made Them Do It

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/arts/30RICH.html?ex=1086940326&ei=1&en=328eae959a71a1ef

"...Some of our self-appointed moral leaders are defending the morally indefensible by annexing Abu Ghraib as another front in America's election-year culture war. Charles Colson, the Watergate felon turned celebrity preacher, told a group of pastors convened by the Family Research Council that the prison guards had been corrupted by 'a steady diet of MTV and pornography.' .... porn, especially gay porn, gave soldiers 'the idea to engage in sadomasochistic activity and to videotape it in voyeuristic fashion.' ...

"Some of these same characters also felt that the media shouldn't show the Abu Ghraib pictures too much or at all - as if the pictures were the problem rather than what they reveal. They are of an ideological piece with Jerry Falwell, who, a mere two days after 9/11, tried to shift the blame for al Qaeda's attack to the 'pagans' and abortionists and gays and lesbians who have 'tried to secularize America.'

"This time the point of these scolds' political strategy... is clear enough. It is not merely to demonize gays and the usual rogue's gallery of secularist bogeymen for any American ill, but to clear the Bush administration of any culpability for Abu Ghraib, the disaster that may have destroyed its mission in Iraq. If porn or MTV or Howard Stern can be said to have induced a few bad apples in one prison to misbehave, then everyone else in the chain of command, from the commander-in-chief down, is off the hook. If the culture war can be cross-wired with the actual war, then the buck will stop not at the Pentagon or the White House but at the Paris Hilton video or maybe 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.'

"The hypocrisy of those pushing this line knows few bounds. They choose to ignore the reality that the most popular images of sadomasochism in American pop culture this year have been those in 'The Passion of the Christ,' an R-rated 'religious' movie that many Americans took their children to see, at times with clerical blessings. Mel Gibson's relentlessly violent, distinctly American take on Jesus' martyrdom is a more exact fit for what's been acted out in Abu Ghraib than the flouncings of any cheesy porn-video dominatrix.

'The other hypocrisy of the blame-the-culture crowd is that 'normal Americans' don't partake of the 'secular' entertainment that is doing all this damage. In other words, the porn that led to prison abuse is all ghettoized in the blue states. The facts say otherwise. Phil Harvey, the president of the North Carolina-based Adam & Eve, one of the country's largest suppliers of mail-order adult products, said in an interview last week that his business has for years been roughly the same per capita throughout the continental United States, with those Deep South bastions of the Bible Belt, Alabama and Mississippi, buying only 10 percent fewer sex toys and porn videos than everyone else."
Last edited by S'tan
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