If a respected Reagan appointee on one of the highest courts in is caught posting prurient and even explicit sexual photos on his personal website what does this say about the rest of society?
This week 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski was slated to preside over a major obscenity lawsuit. LA Times reporters noted that Judge Kazinski had himself posted pornographic material on his personal website. Apparently, he didn’t know the site was open to the public.
After waffling on the appropriateness of this material (one picture apparently featured naked women painted as cows on all fours) Judge Kozinski passed part of the blame onto his son. To his credit Judge Kozinski has now declared a mistrial and asked a panel of judges to review his actions.
The New Drug
I’m certain we don’t care to know the state of Judge Kozinski’s odd interests but it speaks volumes about where we are as a culture today. The spate of free, 24-hour access to the worst kind of pornography has redefined the notion of “an addict”. In previous decades, you had to be a patron of some unseemly shop, purchasing your fix over some dirty counter. Today, the kitchen counter is the medium of choice. Apparently, the legal bar is not exempt from these transactions either.
As Mark Kastleman notes in his book, The Drug of the New Millennium, pornography is just about the perfect drug: piped free of charge into the home, reusable, and with no outward signs of use (unless you publish your porn library online). The effects are no less dramatic than real drug use, ending in financial burdens, spousal abuse, child exploitation, deceit, divorce and destruction.
So, how pervasive is pornography? Earlier this year an article entitled: “Generation XXX: Pornography Acceptance and Use Among Emerging Adults” was published in the Journal of Adolescent Research. The researchers found:
… roughly two thirds (67% ) of young men and one half (49%) of young women agree that viewing pornography is acceptable, whereas nearly 9 out of 10 (87%) young men and nearly one third (31%) of young women reported using pornography.
Someone recently emailed us a picture of a ten-year-old boy they knew with an earring, not wholly uncommon these days - unless it happens to be a small gold-plated Playboy bunny earring – which it was. Branding is everything.
Child Pornography
Last year, a Milwaukee man was convicted of trading explicit photos of his own pre-teen daughter online. When discovered and arrested, the shocked parents of the local community asked aloud: “Why?” Pressed to explain, the man’s lawyer replied: "He hasn't been able to really answer that."
The collective sigh you hear is what many families experience when confronted with the stark and dark realities of child pornography: “we haven’t been able to answer that”.
Psychologists have adopted the word “habituation” to refer to the denigrated state that many porn addicts succumb to: an abyss where the usual pornographic fix doesn’t cut it anymore. At this stage the porn addict, like his peer the druggie, seeks after more and more and worse and worse kinds of material to satiate the chemical releases which the brain has adapted to.
5-year-old Destiny Norton was playing outside in the hot Utah summer of 2006. She was lured into the home of a neighbor, suffocated and then, the unspeakable. The 20-year-old murderer/rapist later told the media: “I have now become a strong advocate against pornography.”
Just last month the Supreme Court upheld existing child pornography laws which help law enforcement agencies crack down on this ugly market. Last week three ISPs in New York agreed to block and remove any and all child pornography on their servers.
Let’s be clear: this is a difficult situation any way you cut it. Earlier this year County Attorney Troy Rawlings of Utah was faced with the prospect of charging 27 people with felonies for producing and sending child pornography via cell phones. The problem? They were all 13-year-old middle-schoolers. The odd nexus of technology, amorality and teenage curiosity may just get the best of us. But can we be content with cleaning the grime but not curing the water? Continued... |