Editor's note: This is sixth in a seven-part anti-pornography series reported by the LDS Church News staff.
• Part 1: March 3, 2007 — In your family?
• Part 2: March 10, 2007 — Protecting homes from pornography
• Part 3: March 17, 2007 — Young and trapped
• Part 4: March 24, 2007 — Dual relationship with family, fantasy
• Part 5: March 31, 2007 — Finding recovery from porn addiction
• Part 6: April 14, 2007 — Fight to stop porn
• Part 7: April 21, 2007 — Defending the home against pornography
• Special report: Nov. 29, 2003 — The silent sin: enslavement of pornography
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Fighters against pornography tend to describe the conflict in ultimate terms, such as "The last great battle" or "the greatest single threat."
A decade ago, they would have been dismissed as paranoid extremists. Today, their descriptions present a dismayingly accurate picture of a vice so pervasive that it is changing entire cultures. Yet even if the porn fighters succeed, their most optimistic scenarios do not see any slowing of its onslaught for at least two years.
The consensus of experts is that filters aren't failproof, and a great network of industries and pornographers are together milking the Internet for all it is worth, and it is worth more every day.
Pornography disrupts homes and businesses with life-changing consequences. One recent estimate from TopTen Reviews, an Internet research company, suggested the industry earns $97 billion annually worldwide.
Homes disrupted by such viewing typically result in heavy sarcasm, loss of sensitivity, lack of intimate relationships, failure to bond, loss of employment, and possibly divorce and various types of abuse.
The cost of lost production and expertise to industry is almost as costly, say observers who point to resulting theft of time, termination of key employees, and sexual harassment in the work place to the sum of $89 billion per year.
One lifelong LDS pornography fighter is John L. Harmer, who served as lieutenant governor of California.
Now a resident of Bountiful, Utah, he wrote a book, The Sex Industrial Complex: America's Secret Combination, which profiles the rise of today's permissive philosophy on sex issues and the giant corporations that profit from exploiting that philosophy through pornography.
The Lighted Candle Society, www.lightedcandlesociety.org, of which he is president, is seeking by research to scientifically — and legally — demonstrate physical damage to the developing brain done by repeated exposure to pornography.
"The brain processes all images ... as real," he writes. These images "trigger a chemical secretion of the body's sex hormones while shutting down the left hemisphere's cognition, logic and speech. Erotic images physically restructure, imprint and physically damage the human brain (especially the undeveloped juvenile brain)."
Brother Harmer shows usage analyses that indicate the most frequent use of pornography in the workplace comes on Fridays, followed by another spike on Sundays.
The Sex Industrial Complex, said Brother Harmer, is made up of the entertainment, pornography, motion picture, slick magazines, music, pay-per-view, video game, big hotel chain, cable television chain, pharmaceutical, credit card, and restaurant industries, which include many companies with familiar names. These companies are protected by well-financed lobbies in Congress or the justice department, he said.
"Pornography's most immediate and powerful impact upon an individual and community, and a nation is the erosion of and finally the total loss of moral values," he writes. "In fact, our primary motivation for fighting pornography is our political philosophy regarding freedom. Stated succinctly, we believe very strongly that the greatest threat to our freedom is the loss of moral values. Pornography destroys the ability to be self-disciplined through commitment to morality."
Another adversary of pornography, Ralph Yarro, said major companies discover pornography use at work and fire even key employees on a daily basis. "It is going to take the corporate world to change pornography when they get sick and tired of paying the porn tax."
Brother Yarro, a former Novell executive, is now a self-funded computer entrepreneur devoting his time to fighting pornography. He is the president of CP (clean port) 80 Foundation, www.cp80.org, a group seeking to have certain ports of the Internet regulated by the government to be free of what is called "mature content."
"The Internet is amazingly powerful; it is still in its infancy," he said. Although 65,000 ports are available, Port 80 is used for standard HTTP Web content. "Let's zone a section of the Internet ports for adult content and move adult content to those ports," he said. "It never makes it into my home where I have to fight it and employ broken filters that don't work.... It is unacceptable that porn is a click away in my house."
He described the current situation as "a public health emergency," with "the most addictive substance on the face of the earth. It is moral degrad(ing) beyond anything we've seen in history."
"(Pornography) is going to be an '08 campaign issue," he said.
"Minority voice is controlling the Internet right now," he asserted. "Kids raised on porn are voting next year. That is going to change everything .... but it is winnable. It is winnable."
Both Brother Harmer and Brother Yarro encouraged those on the sidelines to get involved in the conflict against pornography.
"Wake up," said Brother Yarro. "Apathy will kill you here. If porn hasn't touched your life already, it is going to rip huge, gaping holes in it. You better get active real quick."
Next week: Defending yourself and your family against pornography; questions answered.
E-mail to: jhart@desnews.com
