For those concerned with Free Speech (or Porn), it is time to get active.

Just another case of the noble concept of American freedom being co-opted to an ignoble cause. We're awash in these since the sixties. Wish the Founders would come back and tell you guys a thing or two.

To all those who replied to my one post with their fallacious reasoning:1) The private lives of the founders have nothing to do with what they would establish in law as a Right or a Freedom. People in those days had more sense than to justify their sins in public as is now so commonly done -- since the sixties lefties started turning our Constitution inside out and extending rights and freedoms to the previously criminal and socially unacceptable, as defined by every society on earth up until now.2) The fact that pornography has always existed is an equally bogus point. It has never been treated as legitimate and flaunted before the public as it is now, and justifed as a Right.Carry on. I'm through here.

So "the founders" all 200 or so of them are now reduced to Franklin and Jefferson. Figures.

Of COURSE it has always existed. Didn't I SAY that? But SANE SOCIETIES do not make it an in-your-face public thing. The insane ones have a terrific record of collapsing, you want to emulate those? That IS where we're headed, with the help of the kind of thinking on this thread.The fact is that this did NOT get going in this country until the 60s and now we ARE awash in it and it is NOT what the Constitution had in mind, that is a perversion of the intent of the Constitution.But this is just to be clear in case there was some confusion. I KNOW you don't care and you just have more nasty personal things to say to me and I'm not listening. NOW I'm through here.

I'm not sure what you are arguing with. What exactly in those images contradicts anything I've said? Religious sex doesn't contradict the basic conservatism of sexual mores in a society, which characterizes Indian society too. However, religious sex is condemned in the Bible, and India's extreme poverty and class divisions and cow worship and millions of "deities" don't exactly describe a prosperous well ordered society. The West has been so prosperous because of our basic adherence to God's Law, including sexual propriety and respect. That's going now, that's my point. All that is going since the sixties, so I guess we can look forward to becoming some version of a third world country, if we continue to exist at all that is.

Maybe I'm wrong about how conservative India's basic sexual mores are. It is hard to know. Often those co-exist with extreme depravity as well. I was just reminded of the missionary to India, Amy Carmichael, who went to save children from lives of temple prostitution there, quite a common thing. Is this an admirable way of life? It seems to be the dominant view of this thread -- the more sexual freedom the better. Of course nobody here is going to condone this kind of abuse of children, but wherever sexual liberty is extolled, it's funny how much abuse one always finds connected with it.

They are actually just now on the verge of becoming prosperous THANKS TO British colonization, whatever its inequities. It did the nation a great service. That is the view at any rate of writer Dinesh D'Souza, who came here from India as a student.And even our worst poverty is riches by comparison with most of the rest of the world. You are quite wrong about that. We are wealthy even down to our poverty.

I do have a very bad habit of leaving and not leaving. Very vacillating. I apologize.

If you had followed the thread you might possibly have noticed that I was responding to Schrafinator's claim that India is superior because of its religious sexual imagery, to which I answered with the information about temple prostitution of children. Is the society admirable for its sexual openness or not? And the theme of abuses has been discussed on this thread by others.If you want me to elaborate my own view of it, porn is an abuse, an exploitation. It's an abuse of sexuality as such. It is, basically, infidelity. Even if you don't (yet) have a spouse it is an abuse of the one you may yet have, and it certainly is infidelity to your present spouse. Men often try to get their partners involved in porn with them, but most women just feel alienated by it, may go along with it to please the man but would rather not. Porn trains a person in preferences that may be imposed on the spouse against (her) wishes, or lead a person to look outside the marriage to fulfill them. It TEACHES sexual inclinations, as much as it expresses what is already there. It is an interference with a loving sexual relationship.Now of course everyone will yell that it's not so.I'd REALLY appreciate a little politeness. "Shut up" is not polite. If you'd read through the thread you'd have seen that my remarks were in context, and were not addressed to you in any case.This message has been edited by Faith, 06-28-2005 11:41 AMThis message has been edited by Faith, 06-28-2005 11:43 AM

I have no problems with private experience legally speaking, only I have to say that it WILL bring about God's judgment on you eventually and it will contribute to God's judgment of the nation, certainly, but your defense of it will contribute more than your participation in it, I suspect, as your defense of it influences others. You may treat this as merely my "belief" of course since I can't *prove* it but I certainly can't grant that you might be right since I believe the word of God trumps your opinion. I'm not saying this in a bitchy way, it's simply my view of the situation. I know you want me to agree to YOUR view of *tolerance* and allow that I might be wrong and you right, but as you must know, I don't regard this as *my* view, it is God's view, and He can't be wrong. I'm not requiring YOU to agree with MY view OR God's view, you see, merely informing you of it. Fair enough? {EDIT:: BY THE WAY, I rather doubt you are willing to agree that *I* might be right about this, correct?} Oh and many other things we try to influence each other to, as well. We drag each other to favorite restaurants, and to movies and other entertainments that are less enjoyed by the partner too. I'm sure you can recognize the emptiness of your own argument here. The question has to do with the nature of porn itself. If it is neutral or good, then we may class it with church and movies. If it is bad, we have another situation, and I'm of course on the side that it is bad. The only point about how it is bad that I'm making at the moment is that I believe it is a form of infidelity or cheating on one's spouse -- which is usually the woman. How would I know this is true? I used to work in a field where I interviewed and counseled people in such situations. Of course times may have changed appreciably and women are even MORE determined to accept the male standard than they were then, and have their own porn and all that. It's a way of getting even I suppose since what women want out of sex is usually not quite what men want them to want. What are the statistics? You probably know. They may be there in some sense but they take on a particular direction and power under the influence of porn. That is my impression. The situation is quite different. Porn causes a direct bodily reaction, which is its purpose. It is not an intellectual or imaginative experience the way adventure stories are, though I would have to say that fiction may also influence people for better or for worse, especially children, and there is some fiction that is somewhat porn-like in that its only purpose seems to be to provoke and satisfy some fantasy scenario, most of it innocuous enough however. I think it mostly has to do with its tending to turn the spouse/partner into a sex object and make demands on that partner, conscious or unconscious, that may not be welcome. I think Schrafinator's remarks about the body image of the sex partner are very relevant -- that's like a form of infidelity right there, that a different kind of body or personality may be part of the pornographic effect. Yes, porn may merely exploit what is already there, but it may also give strength to the impulse by creating images where the person wouldn't come up with them himself. It should work, but no, it obviously doesn't.This message has been edited by Faith, 06-29-2005 12:32 AMThis message has been edited by Faith, 06-29-2005 12:34 AMThis message has been edited by Faith, 06-29-2005 12:51 AM

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Faith, way back in message 124 of this thread, you asserted that Schrafinator had claimed that that India was in some was superior (I presume from context you meant superior to the U.S.) because of sexual religious imagery.

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I infer her opinion from her positive terms for describing the religious imagery as "legitimate" and "important" and her apparent desire to denigrate "[my] religion" as somehow inferior because *theirs* is supposedly older, and its sexual images "legitimate" and "important." It may be a bit of a stretch, but I'm not ready to say I'm wrong. It still seems the most likely interpretation to me. Perhaps you should ask her. She hasn't objected to my way of putting it. If she didn't mean that implication, then I will retract my interpretation.This message has been edited by Faith, 06-29-2005 11:50 AM

That's not what I said. I said I can't grant that you MIGHT be right. That people reserve sex for marriage, that they don't indulge in any artificial stimulation or other extramarital sexual interests but reserve themselves wholeheartedly for their mate, who is treated with love and respect as The One and Only, is unhealthy for human beings? I admit it's just about unheard-of any more but unhealthy?I might also point out that you are speaking from the male point of view, about what's "healthy" for MEN, while a woman really might have a lot healthier sense of security and healthier self-esteem if she could count on a man's finding all his sexual pleasure with HER just as she is without the threat of his thinking of someone else or wishing she looked or acted different. But that is exactly what I said above that I can't do, I can't grant you the possibility that you MIGHT be right.And but didn't I also say that I'm quite willing for you NOT to grant the possibility I am not wrong or might not be wrong or might be right? I ask merely that you grant me the right to HAVE my view and to express it. Occupying a nation together does not require granting the possibility that anyone is right about anything, much less that they ARE right, it only requires that we *tolerate* with some degree of civility each other's views that we nevertheless regard as absolutely totally completely incontrovertibly unmitigatedly and even pigheadedly wrong as judged by our own (though for the sake of pleasantness we should probably avoid saying "pigheadedly" out loud). First off, it is my view that it IS bad and you can't just come back and Pronounce from On High, as it were, that it is objectively neutral. That is not known. Neutral from what point of view? If in fact it contributes to increased murder and rape of women in the culture (I think that is a distinct possibility) or puts pressures on marriages of the sort I have been focusing on, or feeds some men's dehumanizing images of women, as bodies and not persons, what's neutral about it? And if I'm right about these things, there is nothing subjective about my view, it's quite objective.There isn't the slightest pornographic image in the Bible. It describes many sexual situations but there is nothing pornographic -- erotically stimulating -- about any of them.And I'm not able to make sense out of what you were trying to say about churches and restaurants. Women certainly have their own sexual fantasies, and a woman who has the power, like Cleopatra, might be able to order all kinds of things to suit herself, and there are certainly women who seduce men, including in the Bible (the men are warned that it will contribute to their death), and it's possible there's more female oriented porn now than there used to be, BUT overall porn is massively male-dominated and male-oriented and the women play roles suited to the male fantasies. And again that takes us back to whether they are good or bad or neutral. It depends on whether it is good or bad or neutral. I have been arguing all along here that it is bad for relationships, bad for women, bad for marriages etc. Understanding??? Understanding??? Grow???I would just like to keep the point simple and focused: Male oriented porn often promotes a dehumanizing and demeaning image of women which may have many degrees of exploitative and violent expressions, and is a form of infidelity as experienced by many women.This message has been edited by Faith, 06-29-2005 01:08 PM

Well, if the mere briefly worded information that David lusted after Bathsheba or Amnon seduced Tamar or an earlier Tamar seduced Judah etc etc etc is enough to do it, who needs the elaborate explicit scenarios of porn?

Well I find the Song of Solomon's imagery (flocks of goats, armies with banners, towers and walls) to remove it from anything directly erotic myself, in fact it's the one book in the Bible I do tend to allegorize, but to each his own.

It's beautiful and it's certainly about sexual love but heaps of wheat, deer, towers, walls, flocks, banners? Whatever turns you on as they say.This message has been edited by Faith, 06-29-2005 09:37 PM