4 Comments

Blake
September 2nd, 2011 | 5:04 pm

I have a hard time agreeing with the negative assessment of homeschooled Christian kids. It seems a very ungenerous (read: biased) interpretation of the available data, and it also clashes with my personal impressions: some of the homeschooled Christian families I have met impressed me very much, and also helped me to overcome my left wingy resistance (read: personal animosity) to all things (and persons) Christian. I seriously doubt their kids would have been better off in the public schools.

Alessandra
September 4th, 2011 | 12:56 am

End Child Pornography: Enforce Adult Pornography Laws
by Patrick A. Trueman
September 1, 2011

Ending child pornography is as much a matter of vigorously prosecuting those who distribute adult pornography as it is a matter of prosecuting child pornographers. Presidential candidates should pledge to initiate adult pornography criminal cases and fund research into the adult-child pornography link.
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Excellent article, excellent initiative.

…Guillermo Canovas explained. He pointed out that “studies show that some pedophiles feel attracted to children from an early age, but the majority of them develop the tendency later on. . . . Thousands of people are constantly looking for pornography on the web . . . as their stimulation threshold rises, they feel the need for stronger and stronger material until their search leads them to child pornography.”

Just like people develop a deformed homosexual or bisexual tendency. No one is born either a pedophile nor a homosexual, nor a homosexual pedophile. People devolve into deformed (homo)sexual psychologies.

And culture and environment are profound shapers in that respect.

What a sad day for America to see that people with such deformed sexual psychologies — whether we are referring to pornography or homosexuality — are the ones who have the most power in society, especially the media, this force in transmitting and shaping the most irresponsible and destructive cultural attitudes.

David Nickol
September 4th, 2011 | 7:05 pm

. . . as their stimulation threshold rises, they feel the need for stronger and stronger material until their search leads them to child pornography

It seems the underlying assumption in this is that the most sexually stimulating material is child pornography. Like a person who goes from alcohol to marijuana to cocaine to heroin, a porn consumer goes from something like (we must presume, since we are not told) “conventional” heterosexual porn, to bisexual porn, to violent porn, to kiddie porn. No one doubts that for anyone taking drugs, heroin is much more potent than marijuana. But I think it is extremely dubious to imply that child pornography is the “ultimate turn on.” Most people would find it very difficult to look at, let alone be sexually stimulated by it. So I don’t find the idea of progressing from “ordinary” porn to child porn in the search for ever greater stimulating to be at all convincing.

Alessandra
September 8th, 2011 | 12:08 am

But I think it is extremely dubious to imply that child pornography is the “ultimate turn on.”
Most people would find it very difficult to look at, let alone be sexually stimulated by it.
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Given that you have no knowledge of who “most people” are nor what they think about sexuality (especially what the aspects they hide from public view), nor how they react to child porn, you’re just making a sweeping generalization of this agglomerate of “most people,” without having a reality basis. I would be curious to know exactly what percentage of people don’t find child porn difficult to look at if they think no one knows what they are doing.

Also, yours is another very sloppy interpretation of what was reported. The researcher did not report “most people” were now consuming child pornography, so your reference to “most people” is sloppy.

But I think it is extremely dubious to imply that child pornography is the “ultimate turn on.”

It’s hard to think of something that is more intensely sexually perverted. It’s also a material that legitimizes these perverse desires in the viewer, conveying to them that there have a right to do so, just like people with a homosexual problem have a need to legitimize their deformed sexual psychologies and say it’s normal and healthy. Same mechanism.