### Religion

# Christian Right Fights Porn In The Dorm

A conservative Christian lobbyist group's latest crusade is the elimination of pornography on college campuses.

By Caroline Kelley July 18, 2013 0

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The Family Research Council isn’t afraid to pick a tough fight. It has pushed for the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, endorsed the requirement of a one-year waiting period for couples with children who want to get a divorce, and publicly discouraged the extension of civil rights to homosexuals. Supporters of the FRC, a conservative Christian lobbyist group, gathered Wednesday to discuss the organization’s latest crusade: the elimination of pornography on college campuses.

Fighting “Porn in the Dorm”—as the FRC called their Family Policy Lecture on the subject—is an uphill battle. A 2001 study conducted by scholars at Texas A&M revealed that while 56% of men admit to using the Internet to access sexual explicit materials, 72% of college-aged men readily say the same. Recent figures show higher percentages of porn site subscriptions in zip codes with a great density of young people and those with undergraduate degrees.

The prevalence of porn on campuses hasn’t defeated Dr. Patrick Fagan, Director of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute and Wednesday’s speaker. An Irish former grade school teacher and trained clinical psychologist, Fagan has worked on family issues in Washington with organizations such as the Free Congress Foundation, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Heritage Foundation. His controlled tone, combined with the hum of the FRC’s air conditioning and free Potbelly’s sandwiches, lulled the audience of about 40 young professionals into a comfortable midday trance reminiscent of Sunday school.

“Our teenagers today cannot know what is natural sexuality,” he said, citing a UK study frankly titled, “Basically…porn is everywhere.” Fagan compared modern American society to “pagan Rome,” claiming that the proliferation of sexual deviancy in our country is a direct threat to the “people-forming institutions” of family, church, and school. He considers the matter of paramount importance to civilization as a whole. “Sexual intercourse, like atomic energy, is a powerful agent for good if channeled well, but for ill if not. Healthy societies maintain their stability by channeling the sexual energies of young adults into marriage,” says his 2009 paper, “The Effects of Pornography on Individuals, Marriage, Family, and Community.”

Fagan blamed today’s plague of pornography on modern media. One of his slides included the May 2011 cover of Vogue Paris, which features a pouting Kate Moss being groped by five anonymous male hands. Christian organizations have pointed fingers at everything from technology to politics when it comes to porn. In a 2013 fact sheet without footnotes or citations, a Christian vendor of Internet filtering software called Covenant Eyes claims that 24% of smartphone users store pornographic material on their mobile devices. The organization says that 79% of porn performers have used marijuana, and “politically liberal people” are 19% more likely to look at porn than others.

Using data collected by the Marriage and Religion Research Institute, Fagan cautioned his audience about the personal consequences of pornography consumption as well. He flipped through a slide show of charts that correlated porn use and addiction with high divorce rates, abortions, and deviant behavior. According to his research, those who are exposed to porn as young adults become desensitized to its dopamine rush, which can lead to the pursuit of distorted fantasies involving children, the invalid and even vampires. In an earlier statement released by the FRC, he cautioned, “For college students, the use of pornography is especially problematic. Away from home and surrounded by friends, co-eds are susceptible to an addiction that can destroy their education, their relationships and their future.”

Relationships damaged by pornography use, said Fagan, can include the peer connections that young adults learn from while at university. Though college is a social phase of life, the consumption of porn draws individuals into themselves and discourages positive interaction with others.

Linda Williams, a professor film studies and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, begs to differ. She and college educators around the country have used pornography as a teaching tool and a basis for classroom discussion. “I do believe pornography reveals a great deal about who we are as Americans,” Williams told TIME. “Its sheer popularity warrants examination, the same way we have studied soap opera, television and other popular media in the past.” New York University, Vanderbilt, and Bates College are only a few of the institutions that now use sexually explicit material in film, law and sociology classes.

Though he opposes the exposure of young adults to pornography, Fagan claims that he is not against academic freedom. In fact, he would like to see an increase in the research and discussion of human sexuality on college campuses, because he believes that informed students will choose abstinence over porn. The centerpiece of his presentation was a graph showing that the adults who enjoy the most frequent and pleasurable sexual activity are monogamous, God-worshipping partners. “The single biggest irony is that by and large, those who enjoy the sexual most, that have the most frequent sexual intercourse, are those who follow the Judeo-Christian way,” Fagan told TIME.

62 comments

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RonHarris 5pts

and people wonder at the epidemic of sexual assaults on campus.

jlist 5pts

How is this news? It becomes news because you give these fools attention? Could you maybe stop doing this?

dola25x 5pts 1 Like

This Christian Taliban movement has got to stop this naiveté. You cannot legislate/police pornography. It is a waste of money. Most campuses have an internet use policy in place already. Porn watching is primarily a male thing. Wait....are these the same guys on adult video chat rooms begging to be spanked or join a manage trois? Urgh...

jpaulson81720 5pts

Wow, there is a lot of Christian hate and stereotyping in the comments. There is always going to be nuts in any group of people that make the rest look bad. There is a lot of liberal extremists that make all liberals look bad, there is a lot of conservative extremists that make all conservatives look bad, I could go on and on. I wish everyone would not judge all of us Christians by the misguided acts of the few.

TroyAdamson 5pts

@jpaulson81720 So...you're saying that, as a Christian, you're ok with porn being so prevalent in our society?

jpaulson81720 5pts

@TroyAdamson @jpaulson81720 Just because it is there does not mean I have to watch it. What right do I have to push my morals on other people? Just because I believe pornography is wrong, does not mean anyone else has to.

jpaulson81720 5pts

@TroyAdamson @jpaulson81720 Believing that I have the right to push my morals on others is what is making people pissed off towards Christianity. This goes for things like homosexuality and marijuana as well. We are suppose to be living in a country that is free from religious oppression. Involving religious morals in politics is unconstitutional. God gave us the choice to sin. He wants us to choose not to sin, not be forced not to. God would not have given us freewill if he wanted us to be forced to live a certain way.

rmendez92 5pts

the same "Christian right" has NO problem with people dying from lack of healthcare or letting the poor starve! but i guess you have to stand for something!!!

RyanEngland 5pts

Perhaps they can ally with the radical feminists - there's always lots of them on campus. At first they may seem like unlikely bedfellows (if I may be permitted a small bon-mot), but it wouldn't be the first time when it came to fighting porn. Far right and far left always end up being more alike than different; appealing to vastly different segments of the population with different philosophical and rhetorical styles, while ultimately advocating the same kinds of thing.

Margahm 5pts

I'm sure more than 19% of liberally-minded people //admit// to looking at porn than conservatives. So what's that say about the real numbers? lol

rmendez92 5pts

@Margahm what?

MegaTips 5pts

Fascists! Fascists! Fascists!

Hermione 5pts

I don't waste money or time on this stuff, but as long as the participants are ADULTS, and using protection, I will gladly keep my opinions to myself.

mrbomb13 5pts

Good for the crusaders!

Best of luck to them, and many thanks to TIME Magazine for such coverage!!

roknsteve 5pts

Conservative christians think everything about human life is abnormal when it's actually their beliefs that are abnormal. These people are intolerant of all other religions and all other ways of thinking. But the good news is these dinosaurs are dying out.

IceToes 5pts

Holy crap. These people need a calendar. What year is it where they live? 1930? Protect our young people from smut!!! Keep them from knowing about sex! Because abstinence-only sex ed really works. Yeah. Prevention or whatever. These are the same bigot fascist religious zealots who won't permit birth control, or abortion, or sex education, but also won't support welfare or adoption of the resulting unwanted kids either. Hypocrites.

Aeropage135 5pts

Nobody in this religious group has read Song of Solomon? It's a few euphemisms away from being rated X.

A few facts:

1. Nothing in the bible speaks against masturbation. "Onan" died because he turned an act supposed to be a gesture of empathy to help another have a child per tradition into a self-indulgent act of rape, and directly contrary to God's instructions.

2. If you are not married, you cannot commit adultery. Similarly, if you are not married, you cannot commit adultery in your heart, any more than you can improperly carry out the duties of a Rabbi if you aren't a Rabbi. The issue is not the nudity, it is the cheating (and potential thereof, for which current-technology photographs are not analogous to "checking out" other women In Real Life).

3. The proliferation of porn on the internet has led to less, not more, incidences of sexual crimes. This should be clearly factored in if the objective is truly to "love one's neighbor".

TroyAdamson 5pts

@Aeropage135 1. It is clear from Scripture that illicit sexual fantasies are forbidden, and this is a significant issue with masturbation.

28 But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

29 And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

As to the issue of adultury itself, it is true that one must be married to guilty of it, however, fornication is a sin as well, and any form of sexual pleasure done solely for the purpose of indulgence is considered fornication.

Sex was meant to be for the purpose of creating children. We humans have turned it into a form of self worship and made it as common and meaningless as dirt.

StephenDing 5pts

@Aeropage135 I'm not going to argue with your first 2 points, just the 3rd. in the porn industry, there might be a lot of abuse that the public isn't aware of. so all we see is that people are having sex. but how do we know that there aren't any sexual crimes involved in the making of the video? True, perhaps sexual crimes in what the majority of the people call normal neighborhoods have perhaps gone down, but with porn comes sexual abuse that people are just endorsing by simply watching the video

rayhigh 5pts

Porn is ok, would rather bang my hot asian wife.

notbobdole 5pts

Is this an article or an advertisement? Our media sucks.

AMiller 5pts

Why was this even written, these culture wars have been won by the progressives.

swagger 5pts 5 Like

i've seen or watched porn online but after a while it gets tiresome. i spend most of my time online reading about this sort of right wing extremist christian crusade to impose religion on our society and especially to indoctrinate children into their cults without any kind of informed consent.

this is america's devious and determined taliban whose weapons are through relentless legal assaults and political coercion. we need to stand our ground against this attempt at a theocratic takeover.

therealdude 5pts 1 Like

You can already see the failure and disaster from around the corner on this one. Will it fail completely, like the "war on drugs" or will it half-way work but with unintended consequences the way the chastity movement did, which resulted in more oral and anal sex because they think that preserves their virginity.

I tend to believe the latter....If they work to enact rules that restrict the access of porn, it could backfire by increasing sexual activity on campuses as it could make students more likely to go out and look for other people to actually do those things to, instead of fantasize about it while looking at dirty pictures of it on the internet.

Socrates133 5pts

Couple of questions after reading this article...

A major college campus in my politically liberal hometown in New England just became "tobacco free". No smoking anywhere, not even outside. That would have been unthinkable 30 years ago, when smoking was still allowed in all the dorms. Is freedom being curtailed or is the campus acting to eliminate a public health risk?

What are the effects of Pornography on the brain and body? Could it not be that pornography is a more powerful "drug" than alcohol, tobacco, or other illegal drugs? If so, why wouldn't it be regulated as well? With further research into it's effects, couldn't it be that pornography is as socially frowned on as tobacco in 30 years?

Is the health of a person's soul, meaning their mind, their will, and their emotions, as important as the health of their lungs?

Would anyone make the case that this article was unbiased or demonstrates respect (or at least neutrality) towards FRC? Would you want someone to report about your passions or activities in a similar tone?

foodandart 5pts

@Socrates133 Well, you know after all, you CAN go blind and get hair on your palms from too much pornography.

It MUST be banned...LOL!

All joking aside, there was recently a study that looked into the effects of porn on children who'd been exposed to it for years as they were growing up and they found no more emotional and mental problems in the porn-exposed groups of kids than in the ones who'd been sheltered.

The only problem with a ban of this nature is that not every college student is a bright fresh nubile 19 year old. Some students are in their 40's and 50's with grown children and for sure, they're not going to be told 'no dirty pictures' - esp. after they've had kids themselves.

Porn is mostly pictures and videos OF people in the action of making babies. After all, that's what sex is about; so to limit a person who's already a parent from viewing adult content because they may be in college - is just too lame, meddlesome and condescending for words.

AMiller 5pts 2 Like

@Socrates133

I think you should stop insinuating an idea (porn is bad) without evidence. See: religion

swagger 5pts 2 Like

@Socrates133 science proved that smoking is a reckless health risk to self and others and similar to seat belt laws anti smoking laws are more about mitigating all the lost productivity and health costs associated with it. i'm sure these crusaders will try to present all sorts of bogus studies about social costs which will be weighed against the business interests of adult media. anti smoking policies do not restrict your first amendment rights but censorship does.

harte.ryan 5pts 4 Like

@Socrates133 Last I checked no one caught cancer from pulling their pudd

Duffman 5pts 6 Like

I think smoking 5 packs a day is less harmful than any dose of religion. Religion poisons everything.

DeweySayenoff 5pts 7 Like

The Christian Agenda: Turn everyone into mindless zombies who can't think rationally just so they feel better about the fact that THEY are mindless zombies who can't think rationally.

This is the perfect example of why they think there's a "war on Christianity". They go out and start messing with people, from what they believe to how they live to their very civil rights, and then scream "We're victims because of the WAR ON CHRISTIANITY!!!" when those people fight back or even just say no. They don't have the capacity to look at it from the other side.

The first casualty of religious faith is reason. Benjamin Franklin wrote in Poor Richard's Almanac, "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."

ESPECIALLY Christianity since the entire foundation of the existence of Christianity has been PROVEN to be scientifically unfounded. What's worse, they took "original sin" and said "it's sex." IT NEVER WAS SEX! It was learning about good and evil by eating of the fruit of the tree in the garden. The myth itself says that sex happened BECAUSE of that.

None of which, of course, ever actually happened because science proved it never happened. Frankly, I don't see how sex is either good or evil. That's mostly because good and evil themselves are merely value judgements we place on behaviors loosely based on whether something is generally harmful or helpful.

To go even further to prove the absence of reason and critical thinking, these mentally handicapped individuals are trying to get porn out of dorms. Get 18-22 year old men to stop looking at readily available images and movies of naked women to reduce the amount of sexual self gratification. And they expect these people to fall for that drivel?

What the hell is the color of the sky in their reality?

Personally, I think they'd be a lot more relaxed about things if they actually got laid once in a while.

Aeropage135 5pts

@DeweySayenoff "ESPECIALLY Christianity since the entire foundation of the existence of Christianity has been PROVEN to be scientifically unfounded. What's worse, they took "original sin" and said "it's sex." IT NEVER WAS SEX! It was learning about good and evil by eating of the fruit of the tree in the garden. The myth itself says that sex happened BECAUSE of that."

Absolutely none of this is a correct restatement of what Christianity or Genesis actually says regarding sex.

Gethetruth 5pts 5 Like

@DeweySayenoff

You right about everything including getting laid !! These christian nutcases want to go to Heaven by stiflingly others and calling them liberals; liberals are liberated from superstitious beliefs.

gumshoo 5pts 1 Like

These nut jobs have their work cut out for them. I say - bring it on. They will rally the young vote to lean heavily Democratic for this topic alone! People are compelled to satisfy urges, particularly when young and it won't stop now, nor ever. When you were young - you were horny. These people seem to be jealous of other people's happiness.

Gethetruth 5pts

@gumshoo

When they were young, they didn't get horny !! that's why they cannot stand it !!

romano70 5pts 5 Like

Sex is sex is sex. Period. The Christian-Fascists insist in turning it into more than what it is, turning non-procreational sex into more than just a physiological exercise, that can be used to show affection or even love between two people. They want to turn it into "a force for good"...Really? For the good of whom? According to whom? And who defines the who, how, what and WHEN of sex? YOU? please!!!!

roknsteve 5pts 1 Like

@romano70 Every sex act does not produce children therefore children are a byproduct of sex.

sacredh 5pts

Sex without is an empty experience. But as far as empty experiences go, it's one of the best. Personally, I don't believe in sex outside the confines of a relationship. I think you should get to know a woman very well and commit before you use and degrade them.

pendragon05 5pts 3 Like

Driving through the South from AZ to FL all I saw in the way of billboards were strip joints and the like. Nice going, Bible Belt. Hypocrites.

romano70 5pts 9 Like

@pendragon05 Disgusting pigs, that's what they are. On one hand talking about less government when it comes to feeding hungry children, on the other hand talking about MORE government when it comes to taking away voting/civil rights from minorities. On one hand talking about the "right to life" of fetuses that will be abandoned by their cause at birth and leaving the (sometimes unwilling) parents to punish the baby with their own deficiencies. The "pro-lifers" send more people to prison over minor non-violent drug crimes and to death rows than the bluest of all states combined. Hypocrites is a word that does not convey their level of dual speech and dual morality

ARTRaveler 5pts 12 Like

And overly religious Utah is the porn usage capitol of the country. Maybe the FRC members need to look at their own homes and own phones first before they decide that God retired and left them in charge. Funny that some us never got the memo that these were the people God left in charge of the world or church attendance would be down even further.

If this hate group had been around in Revolutionary times, we would still be singing "God Save the Queen". They certainly would have fought the development of the Constitution and some of the Deists that wrote the document wouldn't be happy with their Taliban attitude. They probably would have burned Franklin at a stake. Haters have to hate!

anon76 5pts 3 Like

Incoming! Morning catnip for sacredh alert!

sacredh 5pts

I have been holding back. I have standards too. They're just much lower than other people's.

BorisIII 5pts

Most guys don't watch porn for the fun of it. I've seen guys go without for too long and they act like their on speed. Maybe they should try and stop women from gossiping. thats been a failed attempt since the bible was written. So many people wouldn't do it if it wasn't necessary.

sacredh 5pts

@BorisIII , stop women from gossiping? It's free advertisizing.

destor23 5pts 4 Like

Never take sex advice from somebody who still says "atomic energy."

sacredh 5pts 4 Like

Plus, whenever you mention B &D or S &M, they think of alphabet soup.

harte.ryan 5pts 9 Like

Why are we fighting religious fundamentalists overseas when we've got plenty of them right here?

sacredh 5pts

Scratch getting any information on breast cancer if you're getting an education.

sacredh 5pts 11 Like

The Christian right may put up a good fight, but I think the college students will be able to beat them off.

TyPollard 5pts 3 Like

@sacredh

Yes, it's what they do best.

sacredh 5pts 4 Like

@TyPollard when I divorced my 1st wife she threatened to show around nude pictures of me. I told her to put my name and phone number on the back.

sacredh 5pts

It's in the 90's here. I mowing the lawn when I'm not taking a break (like now) Not only am I hot, but I'm dripping sweat. Salty. Sticky. Sweat.

romano70 5pts

@sacredh @TyPollard Good for you!! And I bet you look hot....

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