It’s Time to Ban Porn, by Casey Chalk

What if Catholics invested the kind of political and spiritual energy in combatting pornography as they have in abortion? What if there was an annual march on Washington demanding that politicians take action to limit, if not eradicate, pornography from our public landscape? What if our dioceses distributed car magnets featuring hotlines for pornography addiction? What if our parishes organized events to pray outside businesses involved in the pornography industry? What if our Masses featured prayers petitioning God to end our pornography epidemic?

It’s true that pornography is not the same thing as taking an innocent life, as abortion is. Yet there are few public health crises afflicting our nation on the same scale and at the same level of damage as that of pornography addiction. Between five to eight percent of the adult population in the United States is either addicted to pornography or engages in problematic porn use. Almost a third of men between ages 18 and 30 use it daily. Scientific studies are discovering that its effects on the brain are similar to that of compulsive drug use. More than fifty percent of divorce proceedings cite an “obsessive interest” in pornography. Porn encourages physically aggressive forms of sexual behavior—one study noted that almost 90 percent of porn videos depict physical aggression.

If pornography is like a drug, it’s the most easily accessible one in history.   ….