The legalization of Pornography

Yet you still spout the lie that prohibition doesn't work. Alcohol is legal in the states and drug use is encouraged by Hollywood. Prohibition reduced the consumption of alcohol in the USA while it was active. You really think letting 9-year-olds walk into a store and buy alcohol is a good idea? What is your suggestion for a drinking age.

I'm curious how do you feel about steroids and PEDS in sports? I'm for letting people use whatever they want and stopping this sham that is drug testing in sports.


How is porn "freedom of speech"? Porn isn't speech and it isn't a belief or idea.


It being illegal doesn't make people want to do it. Murder is also illegal. Sodomy used to be illegal and it's lot more common now then it was back then. Why not make working illegal to get people more industrious or maybe make families illegal so to reduce the number of single parent homes.


P.S

I apologise for having such insulting and aggressive tone in my posts. I get excited, lol. I guess I lack the skill to make a point in a more diplomatic fashion.

 

Legalization or prohibition won't make much of a difference if people don't know why it's bad and why they should care. People drive over the speed limit because they don't care. Most people would care about porn if they knew how bad it was.

 

Sadly porn will likely become more mainstream. HBO has a new series starting in a couple weeks called the deuce. It's about the rise of the porn industry. I realize most people don't have HBO, but if it catches on more networks will do stuff like it, just like it did with the Sopranos.

 

How is porn killing you? It's just killing your ability to get it up around a real person.

 

Well said. Agree 100%.

 

Second, alcohol consumption declined dramatically during Prohibition. Cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 and 10.7 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928.

Arrests for public drunkennness and disorderly conduct declined 50 percent between 1916 and 1922. For the population as a whole, the best estimates are that consumption of alcohol declined by 30 percent to 50 percent.

Third, violent crime did not increase dramatically during Prohibition. Homicide rates rose dramatically from 1900 to 1910 but remained roughly constant during Prohibition's 14 year rule. Organized crime may have become more visible and lurid during Prohibition, but it existed before and after.

Fourth, following the repeal of Prohibition, alcohol consumption increased. Today, alcohol is estimated to be the cause of more than 23,000 motor vehicle deaths and is implicated in more than half of the nation's 20,000 homicides. In contrast, drugs have not yet been persuasively linked to highway fatalities and are believed to account for 10 percent to 20 percent of homicides.

Prohibition did not end alcohol use. What is remarkable, however, is that a relatively narrow political movement, relying on a relatively weak set of statutes, succeeded in reducing, by one-third, the consumption of a drug that had wide historical and popular sanction.

This is not to say that society was wrong to repeal Prohibition. A democratic society may decide that recreational drinking is worth the price in traffic fatalities and other consequences. But the common claim that laws backed by morally motivated political movements cannot reduce drug use is wrong

 

Let's look at it historically and culturally.

There was censorship, and its enforcement with law. The existing culture was maintained and protected. Whatever we may happen to think about them today, there were, for example, marriage laws... and divorce was illegal. This served to perpetuate the custom of marriage. In the mind of the culture, the public good outweighed the rights of the individual. Today the rights of the individual outweigh the public good [the preservation of culture]. Indeed, it is so far outweighed, that people struggle to even think in terms of collective culture... we are now indoctrinated to think in terms of 'individual rights'.

Seems to me any Christian culture worthy of the name would be unashamedly all for censorship of obscenity.

 

That's dumb.

 

I agree. Take Prohibition for instance. Here you have the more puritan of the country rally together to ban alcohol. It was ideologically motivated, both puritanical and utopian; remove alcohol and we have a chance of perfecting society [there is a very good documentary series on Netflix called 'Prohibition'].

This is very different to an existing culture looking to preserve itself. Notice that the Catholics and the higher forms of the Protestant churches [Lutheran and Episcopalian] didn't want anything to do with Prohibition. They had a culture to preserve, they were not puritans, and alcohol was a part of their heritage and way of life.

Prohibition turned out to be a huge fiasco. And rightly so. But sadly now the US has lost its nerve in near all forms of censorship/ regulation; where individual rights should be counter-balanced by the public good, now they have been hugely elevated and almost deified. The idea of the public good, of culture, of real political culture is near non-existent.

And so the prohibition on alcohol, and possible censorship of pornography can be compared and contrasted. Alcohol is obviously not vicious in itself; in moderation it is actually beneficial to living a warm, social, wholesome, civil, and festive life. Pornography, however, is vicious in itself; there is nothing beneficial about its moderate use. It should be censored heavily... especially from the young.

We think this action of censorship is itself morally reprehensible because we have been indoctrinated with a logic of freedom. I have nothing against freedom, but I do when it comes at the expense of the public good, and a decent public order. Absolute freedom is chaos.

What I'm saying is not religious, but social common sense [also, I believe there is a difference between de-criminalizing something, and actually legalizing it].

 

I think you made some awesome points in this post. I think instead of comparing porn to alcohol it should be compared to tobacco. Neither one has any benefits, even in moderation. Both industries also make money by hurting their customers. If we put the same amount of effort into the dangers of porn as we do for smoking porn consumption would go way down. Obviously, people who are addicted would keep paying, but it would cut down on the number of number of new porn users significantly. The drop in users would cripple them in the years to come, compare U.S. tobacco consumption today to what it was in the 50's. Raising awareness would also make many current users want to quit, and there would be more resources for helping porn addicts. It wouldn't stop everyone from using it, but in a realistic world I don't think you can.

 

I am not for censorship nobody should have the right to tell someone what they can watch or not. However I see nothing wrong making it difficult to access and/or taxing it in some way.

Smoking and drinking all have a "sin" tax applied when you buy those types of products and if the price of cigarettes keep going up I'll end up quitting it's an expensive habit.

However, I think the vast majority of people on here can come to an agreement that it's the accessibility of porn that we want to fix. We don't want it too available that young children to get ahold of it but we don't want to trample on peoples(adults) life choices.

 

I personally don't give a darn what becomes of porn. I simply don't agree that the sky would fall if it became illegal, or that "prohibition" would increase porn usage. Back before the internet, there were plenty of porn/sex addicts. I used to see them in the seedy part of town in sex shops and wankatoriums [ which I assume are mostly out of business now thanks to the internet. I also knew people who had obvious problems with porn and jerking off. It's far too common, but restriction is unlikely despite how utterly nauseating and repulsive a lot of the porn out there is much less making it illegal.

America has come a long way from Playboy, though. Television and news sites are littered with scantily clad breast monsters. They are making it tough to walk the straight and narrow. I think what is more likely than porn becoming illegal is it being illegal to not jerk off, or be in some kind of weird sexual relationship. Seems more the direction things are heading.