Written by Annemarie Lange

According to Google Analytics, pornography searches increase by 4,700% when kids are using the internet in the hours after school ends.

Like it or not, teens are using their devices to access pornography on a regular basis in today’s technology driven society. Where previous generations were cautious of a stolen Playboy magazine, current parents are looking for guidance on how to shield their teens from the ever available, internet pornography.

The average child is now accessing pornography at the age of 11 – and that is much younger than the legal age for viewing such material. Unfortunately, the access to adult content is easy and is available in a couple clicks. Even though most mature and pornographic sites have a pop-up warning away minors, there is nothing to stop them from clicking the ‘over 18’ button and viewing inappropriate material.

A common refrain when people lament violence, sex and f-bombs in movies, goes: “How did we get from the golden days of Hollywood to this?”

Actually, Hollywood, with many notable exceptions, has been at war with decency and American values since its inception. It just wasn’t as starkly apparent.

If you don’t think so, take in some of those black and white films on the Turner Classic Movies channel. Sure, you won’t get nudity, gratuitous violence, or profanity, and some are delightful.  But many are not very good, with stilted dialogue and ham acting, and certain films from the Golden Era are surprisingly subversive.

A case in point is “Theodora Goes Wild,” a 1936 “screwball comedy” that netted Irene Dunn an Oscar nomination for her role as a prim, church organ-playing small-town girl who secretly writes racy novels under a pseudonym.  Upon meeting the randy illustrator of her book covers (Melvyn Douglas), she flees from the New England home she lives in with her two uptight aunts and goes hog wild in New York as the scandalous novelist “Caroline Adams.”  We’re supposed to think this is great.

What’s most subversive is the acidic portrayal of small-town America, and particularly the church ladies. They’re uniformly unattractive, small-minded gossips, backbiters and hypocrites.

The Christian life in “Theodora” is cold, boring and the enemy of a good time.   The only spark of life comes in nightclubs, parties or scenes when the protagonists put it over on the uptight yokels.  Absent is fellowship and community, the pursuit of truth, love of family and neighbor, happiness, mutual sacrifice, and God’s love, all of which are found in a vibrant church.

The deal is sealed for hedonism when the entire town turns out with a marching band to welcome home their heroine once her cover is blown. She’s now famous for writing smut, and lives happily ever after with the illustrator. Nobody but a prude would object. Life is colorful once more.  A literal version of this theme of salvific sex is expressed in “Pleasantville” (1998).

In a larger sense, this is where we find ourselves today. There’s no need for Hollywood to employ subtexts to attack the moral order when we’re already drowning in a sea of sensations. Unless you’re Amish, staying free from the pornified culture is like trying to focus on small print with a tiny book lamp in the middle of the Vegas strip.

Recent columns in Politico.com, the New York Times and National Review have explored America’s acquiescence to the porn culture. They point to the Internet tidal wave and the invention of the smart phone in 2007, which is putting adults –and children – at risk in ways undreamed of a dozen years ago.

Still, technology is only one powerful element.  The main factor is the mid-20^th Century sexual revolution, in which morality, sexual roles, family and what constitutes the good life were upended.

In his 1941 opus “The Crisis of Our Age,” Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin traced the waning of traditional American norms to just before World War II, when advertising imagery and movies became increasingly sensual.  America was an ideal-driven culture that honored virtue, duty and delayed gratification.  Then it began to slide toward a sensate culture that valued cultivating and sating appetites above all. Sorokin compared it to the decline of Greece and Rome, whose art evolved toward the sensual as the empires declined.

In “Kinsey, Sex and Fraud” (1990) and subsequent books, Judith Reisman has chronicled the enormous impact of Alfred Kinsey’s fraud-packed sex studies in 1948 and 1953.  Hugh Hefner drew inspiration from them to launch the Playboy empire, which mainstreamed porn and helped fund Roe v. Wade’s legalization of abortion. With the advent of the birth control pill and the explosion in visual stimuli, the wheels came off.

In his classic “Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley envisioned a future in which every need was met and sex was noncommital.  Anyone experiencing discomfort could take the drug “soma” to zone out on “soma holiday.”  Unlike our opioid crisis, people did not overdose on soma, but both dull the body and soul.

So here we are, with every conceivable way to gratify our appetites.

Are we happier? Does constant pursuit of sensations bring sustained joy? Not likely. That comes from purpose, accomplishment, and close bonds with family and friends.  It comes from knowing that we’re valued and loved by a creator God Who cares enough to give us rules to live by, and, as shown in Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son, forgiveness and reconnection.

Perhaps not all is lost.  There seems to be genuine concern among some in the intelligentsia over the culture’s destination. The campaign to label porn as a public health hazard is finding purchase, and what actually produces health and happiness is becoming more evident by the day.

Hollywood turns out some good flicks now and then, and there’s always hope for more uplifting fare even beyond the wholesome stuff on the Hallmark Channel. Three years after scripting “Theodora Goes Wild,” Sidney Buchman was nominated for a screenplay Oscar for “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

Robert Knight’s latest book is “A Nation Worth Saving: 10 Steps to Restore Freedom” (djkm.org/nation, 2018).

This article was originally published at Townhall.com

Once upon a time in America, society demanded civility and honored women and motherhood.

But honor seems to have been tossed by the wayside in this modern era and exchanged for a cheap view of the female sex.

What happened to so utterly change the widespread estimation of the “fairer” sex?

First, we must understand that our nation’s mores were built upon a biblical worldview. We read this in Proverbs:

Charm is deceitful and beauty is passing,
But a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised. (Proverbs 31:30)

He who finds a wife finds a good thing,
And obtains favor from the Lord. (Proverbs 18:22)

The Founders — many of whom were devout Christians and the rest of whom believed in a Creator and respected biblical Christianity — envisioned a country of free men and women and families devoted to one another, worshipping freely.

During the years when Americans adhered to the original worldview of the first settlers and Founders, individuals were treated with respect. Each person was acknowledged as created by God and thus intrinsically valuable.

Women were protected and honored. Pregnant women were protected and honored. Mothers were respected and honored.

But with the twentieth century came some wholly destructive changes.

In 1921, Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which became Planned Parenthood in 1942, and ushered in the radical notion that babies in the womb had no intrinsic worth. Their worth was determined by their usefulness to society.

Sanger convinced many women that motherhood was not a blessing and that some people by virtue of their mental abilities or race were not worthy of life. This was a monumental lie based on a Darwinist worldview.

Planned Parenthood’s nefarious founder accepted and promoted the philosophical assumptions of “materialism“:

a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter.

Sanger’s philosophical beliefs contributed to the erosion of the view of mankind as the height of God’s creation, replacing it with a “utilitarian” viewpoint. Utilitarianism deems people worthy of life based on their capacity to contribute to society.

In the span of twenty years many Americans were persuaded that people were not intrinsically valuable because God created them, but rather, a person’s value was dependent upon their utilitarian value.

Next came Hugh Hefner and Second-wave feminists like Helen Gurley Brown and Gloria Steinem who persuaded men and women that sex apart from marriage and procreation was fine and dandy. Throw off the chains of old thinking and embrace your sexuality!

Helen Gurley Brown convinced several generations of women to engage in sex outside the safety of a loving marriage. Ms. Brown taught young women, enamored of Cosmo and the free love mantras of the day, that the sole goal of sex was orgasm and pleasure.

Counter that with God’s wondrous idea: sexual intimacy was to be the height of oneness between a man and wife, and the means of procreation. Marriage was intended to be a safe place, a refuge, where a loving husband and wife could raise children in the fear and admonition of the Lord.

But indeed, if humans are not wondrously created by a Creator but, instead, are merely biologic units, then sex is no different than any other biological activity.

Hugh Hefner with his slick Playboy magazine indoctrinated decades of men of all ages with the lie that unrestrained sex is a terrific recreational activity and women’s bodies are the intended venue. Playboy perpetuated the view of women as playmates.

If a man believes that women are good for a thrill, like a ride at Six Flags, he is less likely to consider her character and heart important. He becomes concerned only with her body.

Hefner was a proponent of the “if it feels good do it” movement and convinced millions of men to throw off  archaic, puritanical ideas about womanhood and sex.

It was a very short step from nullifying mankind’s intrinsic value to sex with no restraint.

Add to that horrendous mix of immoral indoctrination the radical feminist movement. If Cosmopolitan magazine was the “bible” of free love, sex and orgasm for the single girl, Gloria Steinem was the prophetess of the sexual revolution.

Steinem founded Ms. magazine in 1969, which happily harmonized with Cosmo, further disseminating the dogma of free love and sex without the tedious tether of marriage.

The devotees of Brown and Steinem–who were once college radicals burning bras, protesting the Vietnam War, rebelling against parental authority, and belittling the institution of marriage–are now ensconced in America’s halls of academia teaching malleable young minds.

We now know what happens when you teach a nation that people have no intrinsic value, that women are mere means to pleasure, that women should want unfettered sex whenever and however, and that humans in utero are disposable.

Women in 2017 are beginning to realize that they’ve been sold a rotten to the core bill of goods.

In 2017, America has been forced to reckon with the consequences of almost a century of humanistic, unbiblical, immoral ideology. Free “love” is neither love nor free. It’s hedonism and it’s costly.

Women are objectified. Sexually transmitted diseases proliferate. Unwanted pregnancies terminated by abortion result in, not only murdered babies, but severe depression in women. Men, being denied their rightful duty and purpose to protect women and children, are emasculated and devalued.

How can we turn this around? How can we once again teach the amazing worth of each man and woman, boy and girl?

How can we teach men that women are not playmates to use but, rather, persons created in the image and likeness of God?

How can we turn back the clock to a time when men honored women–a time when men would stand when a lady entered a room?

America can change only if we as a nation turn to the principles that first made us great: God’s principles.

America can become a safe place once more for women and babies if we teach the transcendent truth that “all men [and women] are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Americans can realize the great heritage of our nation if we repent and acknowledge the words of the Psalmist:

Happy are the people whose God is the Lord!

End-of-Year Challenge

As you may know, IFI has a year-end matching challenge to raise $160,000. That’s right, a great group of IFI supporters are colluding with us to provide an $80,000 matching challenge to help support IFI’s ongoing work to educate, motivate and activate Illinois’ Christian community.

Please consider helping us reach this goal!  Your donation will help us stand strong in 2018!  To make a credit card donation over the phone, please call the IFI office at (708) 781-9328.  You can also send a gift to:

Illinois Family Institute
P.O. Box 876
Tinley Park, Illinois 60477

America was founded as a beacon of light, a refuge to those who only wanted to worship the God of the Bible as they saw fit. Our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, were infused with biblical precepts and a presumption of a Creator and His transcendent Truth.

For over 200 years this experiment in liberty flourished, lighting the world with the light of Truth and Righteousness.

At times during our nation’s history, Americans en masse veered toward the broad path to destruction. And at every departure from upright and moral living, a preacher or prophet of sorts would proclaim the words of God’s inspired Book, people would repent, and our national character would be righted.

God told Israel the truth, which still applies today:

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live. Deuteronomy 30:19

But in the twentieth century, culture-changers assaulted our society, teaching people to exchange the truth for lies, with cascading and calamitous results. The following have deceived people to choose death, rather than life.

Margaret Sanger (September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966), a nurse and proponent of birth control and eugenics, inspired the Nazis with her notions of breeding and forced sterilization to weed out the less than desirable races. “Nurse” Sanger was the Founder and first president of Planned Parenthood.

As I wrote in 2014:

…she formed the organization, American Birth Control League [est. 1921], which would eventually become Planned Parenthood [est. 1952].

And like the modern day organization, cloaking its true agenda in palatable verbiage such as “family planning” and “choice,” Margaret’s goal was far more evil than the respectable facade she presented.

. . .

Sanger was a Darwinist who embraced a utilitarian view of human life, and proposed to rid our nation of the criminal element and “inferior races” through abortion and breeding programs.

Thanks to Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood has cruelly slaughtered approximately 300,000 pre-born children a year since Roe v. Wade, or about 13.2 MILLION total.

Thanks to Sanger, life has been cheapened, and sexual intimacy divorced from the God-ordained, relationship of marriage.

Sanger pushed America to sow the seeds of destruction and the devaluation of life with abortion and a utilitarian view of human life.

Subsequently we’ve reaped the harvest of catastrophic and crippling depression in generations of women.

Alfred Kinsey (June 23, 1894 – August 25, 1956) was a biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and a sexologist. He is known as the “Father of the Sexual Revolution” and founded the famed Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Kinsey shook the nation with his books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).

These books revealed to a shocked and somewhat titillated population things they had never known about themselves: That between 30-45% of men had affairs, 85% of men had had sex prior to marriage, that a staggering 70% of men had slept with prostitutes, and that between 10 and 37% of men had engaged in homosexual behavior.

Alfred Kinsey’s studies, in retrospect, paved the way for hedonistic depravity. And how did Kinsey obtain the findings reported in his books?

Kinsey himself was a pervert and a sex criminal.

For example, where did he get all of his data on the “sexual behavior of children”? The answer is nothing short of chilling. Dr. Judith Reisman (whose research has since been confirmed time and time again) explained in her groundbreaking work Sex, Lies and Kinsey that Kinsey facilitated brutal sexual abuse to children as young as two months old, to get his so-called research:

Kinsey solicited and encouraged pedophiles, at home and abroad, to sexually violate from 317 to 2,035 infants and children for his alleged data on normal “child sexuality.” Many of the crimes against children (oral and anal sodomy, genital intercourse and manual abuse) committed for Kinsey’s research are quantified in his own graphs and charts.

. . .

The Father of the Sexual Revolution was a sado-masochistic bi-sexual sex criminal who facilitated the sexual torture of infants and children.

Thanks in large part to Alfred Kinsey, sexual deviancy and pedophilia were heralded as normal, and any and all sexual activity divorced from the God-ordained, relationship of marriage.

Kinsey taught America to sow the seeds of depraved sexual activity without the good and protective constraints of the previously held Judeo-Christian worldview.

Subsequently our nation has reaped the harvest of lives ruined, marriages wrecked, and all-time high venereal disease — now called Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

More than two million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis were reported in the United States in 2016, the highest number ever, according to the annual Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance Report released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“Increases in STDs are a clear warning of a growing threat,” said Jonathan Mermin, M.D., M.P.H., director of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention. “STDs are a persistent enemy, growing in number, and outpacing our ability to respond.”

An epidemic accelerating in multiple populations—impact growing in women, infants, and gay and bisexual men.

Timothy Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and writer. He was an enthusiastic advocate of LSD and other psychedelic drugs. Leary’s famous quote “turn on, tune in, drop out” affected a generation of rebellious youth in, for the most part, the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Leary’s disciples turned onto drugs, tuned into sex, rock and roll, and dropped out, in many cases dropped dead, including: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Cole (The Association), Gram Parsons (The Byrds), Tommy Bolin (Deep Purple), Gregory Herbert (Blood, Sweat & Tears), Keith Moon (The Who), Sid Vicious (Sex Pistols), Lowell George (Little Feat), and more.

Thanks to the influence of Timothy Leary, a generation or more of Americans chose to escape life via drugs, and became enslaved by LSD, heroin, barbiturates, and other dangerous substances. Thousands of young Americans followed Leary’s direction into an untimely death.

Timothy Leary cajoled Americans to sow the seeds of escapism and societal anarchy and substance abuse.

Subsequently America has reaped the harvest of crime, ruined lives, and death.

Helen Gurley Brown (February 18, 1922 – August 13, 2012) was an author, publisher, and businesswoman. She pushed women in America to throw off their sexual inhibitions. Brown’s book, Sex and the Single Girl (1962) “encouraged women to become financially independent and experience sexual relationships before or without marriage.”

Brown gained further prominence as the Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan magazine from 1965 – 1997. Continuing her mantra of sex without boundaries, Cosmo under HGB “set itself apart by frankly discussing sexuality from the point of view that women could and should enjoy sex without guilt.”

To this day Cosmopolitan is known for its edgy (aka immoral) sexual agenda and in September of this year alone reached over 32 million readers.

Thanks to Helen Gurley Brown, millions of young women were led to believe that sexual intimacy can and should be enjoyed without the burden of marriage and fidelity.

Ms. Brown deceived teen girls and women to sow the seeds of wanton, narcissistic sexuality.

Subsequently American women reaped the harvest of babies out of wedlock, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, and ruined lives and marriages.

Hugh Hefner (April 9, 1926 – September 27, 2017) was an American businessman, magazine publisher and playboy. He rejected the Christian faith of his parents in exchange for a life of rampant sexual conquest. “Hef” was Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Playboy magazine. Wikipedia describes Playboy:

Playboy is an American men’s lifestyle and entertainment magazine. It was founded in Chicago in 1953, by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner’s mother. Notable for its centerfolds of nude and semi-nude models (Playmates), Playboy played an important role in the sexual revolution and remains one of the world’s best-known brands, having grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc.

After his death in September of this year, many in the world were lauding Hugh, such as frequent Playboy model and one-time Playmate of the Year, Jenny McCarthy, who gushed:

[Hugh was] the most good-hearted, caring, generous, supportive friend, and mentor…his zest for life was contagious

McCarthy tweeted:

But what is the truth?

The truth is that Hugh Hefner disseminated the lies that women are playthings (i.e. Playmates), objects of men’s desires and lust, and tools for gratification.

Contrast that with God’s admonition for love within marriage:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. Ephesians 5:25

However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Ephesians 5:33

Thanks to Hugh Hefner, pornography became commonplace in America and women were stripped, not only of their clothing, but of their intrinsic worth. Thanks to Hef, sex became a meaningless pastime, a means to a few moments of physical pleasure, rather than the height of intimacy between husband and wife and a means of procreation.

God created sex to be beautiful and meaningful. Satan, the great liar who loves to offer counterfeits, twists it into a vile, animalistic act.

Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine led our culture to sow seeds of dehumanizing women, and separating sexual intimacy from the safe, loving environment of true marriage.

And subsequently America has reaped a culture teaming with sexual users and predators. Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey and the other users in Hollywood and elsewhere didn’t happen in a vacuum, or by accident.

The Apostle Paul tells us in Galatians:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. Galatians 6:7

If we repent, as individuals, and as a nation, we can re-light our beacon. But Americans must follow Truth and Life. We must choose Blessing not Cursing. We must reject the false promises and evil teaching of Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey and Timothy Leary and Helen Gurley Brown and Hugh Hefner and others.

There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. Proverbs 14:12

If Americans choose Truth, then we’ll reap blessing and life and life abundantly.

But only if we choose Truth.

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Hugh Hefner, the bachelor hedonist who brought us female exploitation and sex clubs, passed away Wednesday at the age of 91. The media has erupted in praise for his alleged championing of “free speech” through the pornographic magazine, Playboy, which was founded in Chicago in 1953. Hefner’s Playboy Club featured bow-tied women in bunny costumes, as “pets” of deviant and perverted men. In an article in The Washington Post, columnist Derek Hawkins points out:

He portrayed himself and his magazine as defenders of women’s rights, but his critics have called him anything but, pointing to his rotating cast of girlfriends, multiple divorces and general objectification of women in the pages of Playboy (“They are objects,” he once told Vanity Fair).

Christian pro-family groups have long believed pornography is not only degrading to women, but it reduces them to mere sex objects solely for the pleasure of men. And it should not be surprising that the “progressive” agenda for sexual “rights” was among Playboy’s themes.  In multiple ways, Hefner worked hard to advance the antithesis of Biblical morality, by helping to change the cultural understanding of God’s plan for human sexuality.  Hefner and other porn pushers were on the front lines of the culture wars for decades, even promoting the LGBTQ agenda before the media, academia and Hollywood became advocates for sexual amorality.

“Hugh Hefner leaves behind a legacy of sexual exploitation and public health harms,” says Patrick Trueman, President of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. “Playboy popularized the commodification of the female body in soft-core pornographic magazines in the 1960s, and it laid the groundwork for the public health crisis of Internet pornography that America is experiencing today. Reams of research show that Internet pornography is linked to neurological harms, sexual dysfunctions, and increases in rates of sexual violence.”

“Hugh Hefner was not a champion of free speech. He was a pioneer in the sexual objectification and use of women,” Trueman continued. “Research shows that Playboy historically portrays female sexuality as subordination and universal availability to the male gaze. How can our society accept, let alone applaud, these messages about the value of women when we are simultaneously struggling with campus sexual assault, military sexual assault, and the culture of sexual harassment in Silicon Valley?”

Kimberly Drake, a former stripper in a topless club couldn’t agree more, pointing out that pornography dehumanizes women.  She depicts it well:

In Playboy, the centerfold is called a playmate. That makes her a toy. There are playboy bunnies and penthouse beavers, that makes her an animal. The problem here is that if she is seen as an object she can be used, abused and thrown away. If I wreck my car I might be sad I wrecked my car, but I can go out and get another one. This is just another lie it tells us about women. How then do we view ourselves? How does our spouse or significant other view women if he has been caught up in this lie? This attitude is a key factor in violence towards women.

To this point, Trueman stresses that it’s  “time to acknowledge the reality that Playboy is actually just another brand for old-fashioned misogyny.”

A terrible consequence of pornography is its affect on men, women, and children. The regular viewing of porn changes our attitudes about relationships. It even affects how we view ourselves. It touches every level and every relationship we have.  Even Psychology Today acknowledges that porn affects relationships.  However, a Biblical understanding of the purpose of sex within marriage is a great blessing.

“I will set nothing wicked before my eyes…”
Psalm 101:3a

See also Proverbs 6:27-33; Matthew 5:27-28; James 1:14-15; Matthew 5:28; 1 Corinthians 6:18-20; Job 31:1; Psalm 119:37; Hebrews 13:4; Galatians 5:19 and Proverbs 6:32-33.

Read more:

The Human Costs of the World Hugh Hefner Created

Playboy Was Dedicated to Replacing the Faithful, Married Man With a Rakish Figure

The Death of Hugh Hefner and the End of the Sexual Revolution

Hugh Hefner Isn’t Dead. He Lives Rent Free Inside Our Heads

Hugh Hefner Did Not Live the Good Life

Hugh Hefner’s Legacy Is About More Than Sex

Hugh Hefner’s Legacy of Despair

Hugh Hefner and the Sexual Revolution

Learn more about the public health harms of pornography: The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, Concerned Women for America and Focus on the Family.

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A venerable parable from Confucian China told of an elderly man who had seen emperors and events come and go, and observed from his Confucian worldview that good news and bad news were often difficult to tell apart. “Good news? Bad news? Who’s to say?,” he would reply to any news from his neighbors.

I thought of that parable when I read the headlines that announced the news that Playboy would cease the publication of nude photographs of women in its magazine. From any moral perspective, that should appear as good news. The headlines might suggest that Playboy has had a change of heart. A closer look at the story, however, reveals a very different moral reality. Playboy acknowledged that its decision had nothing to do with any admission that pornography is morally wrong. Instead, the publishers of the magazine were acknowledging that their product was no longer commercially viable as explicit pornography because pornography is so pervasive in the Internet age that no one need buy their product.

Scott Flanders, Playboy CEO, told the media that his product had been overtaken by the larger culture. “You’re just one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And it’s just passé at this juncture.”

That is one of the most morally revealing statements of recent times.Playboy has outlived its ability to transgress and to push the moral boundaries. As a matter of fact, it was a victim of its own sad success. Pornography is such a pervasive part of modern society that Playboy is now a commercial victim of the very moral revolution it symbolized and promoted for decades.

Reporting on the story, of The New York Times commented: “Now every teenage boy has an Internet-connected phone instead. Pornographic magazines, even those as storied as Playboy, have lost their shock value, their commercial value and their cultural relevance.”

That is a stunning and sadly accurate assessment on all three fronts. The iconic magazines of the sexual revolution, the very magazines that promoted the sexual revolution and opened the floodgates to even more explicit and graphic pornography, have lost their ability to shock, their ability to sell themselves to the public, and their cultural relevance — and it is precisely because the culture has become Playboy and what was once shocking is now a feature of mainstream American culture.

Playboy once had a paid circulation of near 8 million. According to the Times, it has only 800,000 subscribers now. The market is much larger than ever, but the marketplace is now the polymorphous perversity of the digital age.

“That Battle has Been Fought and Won”

Another very revealing comment from Flanders was more ambitious. “That battle has been fought and won,” he said. “That battle,” we should note, was the declared battle to overthrow an entire system of sexual morality that had once defined pornography as sin and affirmed the responsibility of a civilized society to uphold the dignity of sex and the sanctity of marriage.

As Elizabeth Fraterrigo, author of Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America, noted: “Playboy magazine played a significant role in defining an alternative, often controversial, and highly resonant version of the good life.”

That was the goal of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. Hefner saw himself as a moral revolutionary, even bragging that Playboy “certainly made it possible to open up the floodgates” to the deluge of sexual libertinism that it encouraged, commercialized, and symbolized.

Flanders told the Times that the world has now adopted the Hefner worldview to the extent that his libertarian views on an entire range of moral and social issues are now so widely shared that the magazine’s ability to package pornography is outdated.

By almost any measure, that statement rings true. Pornography is now mainstream entertainment and available 24/7 just a click away. The vision of sexuality glorified by Playboy is no longer on the cutting edge of moral change. Playboy won the battle and can now leave the battlefield commercially wounded but culturally victorious.

The Playboy Philosophy and its Underlying Theology

Hugh Hefner was never less than ambitious and he was never covert in his goals. He wanted to transform American sexual morality and break down the Judeo-Christian sexual morality that was once dominant in the culture. He presented what he identified as the Playboy philosophy of life, and he packaged his product as a way of selling men on the sexual objectification of women — while claiming to present a portrait of sophisticated male sexuality that was both glamorous and free from the shackles of traditional morality.

Underlying every moral philosophy there lies a theology. In Hefner’s case, that theology was also in public view. He told journalist Cathleen Falsani that he was a “spiritual person, but I don’t mean that I believe in the supernatural.” He said that he believes in a creator, but not in the God of the Bible.

As he explained: “I do not believe in the biblical God, not in the sense that he doesn’t exist, just in the sense that I know rationally that man created the Bible and that we invented our perception of what we do not know.”

Further: “I urge one and all to live this life as if there is no reward in the afterlife and to do it in a moral way that makes it better for you and those around you, and that leaves this world a little better place than when you found it.”

As Falsani understood, there was a “Playboy Theology” that explained the Playboy Philosophy:

Hef doesn’t believe in a ‘biblical God,’ but he is fairly adamant about the existence of a ‘Creator.’ He hasn’t been to a church service that wasn’t a wedding, funeral, or baptism since he was a student at the University of Illinois in the late 1940s, but says he worships on a regular basis while walking on the grounds of his own backyard. And he follows a system of morals, but not those gleaned from the Methodism of his childhood–or at least not the ones that pertain to sexuality.

A theology that rejects the “biblical God” and any notion of divine judgment or the afterlife is integral to the Playboy Philosophy, and the overthrow of Christianity as a belief system precedes the rejection of Christian sexual morality. And all this came as Hugh Hefner made millions exploiting women and mainstreaming pornography.

“Good news? Bad news? Who’s to say?”

The headlines announcing that Playboy would no longer feature nude photographs of women looked like good news, but the underlying story is horrifying in moral terms. Playboy did open the floodgates and pornography now pervades the entire culture. Hefner’s moral philosophy and its underlying theology are now mainstream in America, and the current Playboy CEO can claim “that battle has been fought and won.”

What you should hear in that claim of victory is the fall of an entire civilization and the moral consensus that made that civilization possible. Any morally sane person must recognize that as horrifyingly bad news, indeed.

This article was originally posted at AlbertMohler.com

Concerned grandmas and old-fashioned church ladies are locking arms with a growing group of young men plagued with erectile dysfunction. 

Yes, you read that correctly. 

This eyebrow-raising army is taking different approaches to fight a common enemy: pornography. 

Gone are the days of pre-teen boys being introduced to images of naked women’s bodies via discarded Playboy and Penthouse magazines.  Studies show that boys as young as 14 are addicted to pornography easily available on their iPads, laptops, and smart phones.  

The problem is so widespread that in 2009 researchers realized there were not enough college-aged men who did not use Internet porn to form a substantial control group to study in comparison to their porn-using peers. 

The seriousness of porn and its effects on young men, their relationships with others and their lives has its roots in science and the make-up of the brain. Viewing nude bodies stirs a young man’s brain’s dopamine production. Dopamine produces pleasure, and as time goes by, the brain requires more of the hormone to produce the same or greater levels of pleasure.  The dopamine effect unleashed can lead to what scientists now call “arousal addiction.” 

So what’s the harm? Porn viewing is nothing new, and it’s just a natural part of a young man becoming more confident with women to produce mutually pleasurable sexual experiences, right? 

Fact is arousal addiction produced by Internet porn will hit a brick wall in a normal young man’s development. Unnatural arousal is actually destroying sexual performance as the addict experiences gradual desensitization and eventually erectile dysfunction – something medication only cannot reverse. 

Billions of dollars are spent each year on Internet porn and uninformed or disengaged parents naively shrug off the Internet porn phenomenon as natural curiosity. Instead, their sons begin to spend more time alone focused on computer screens as their immature brains demand more and more dopamine and the pleasure it brings. The young men become depressed, withdrawn and develop social anxiety – the fear of interacting with peers, friends and family.  Many become angry and violently act out their aggression. 

It’s at this low point where these devasted young men and their unlikely co-horts — grandmas and old-fashioned church ladies– are converging. Many of these women, having known all along the devastating effects for years of pornography on men, women, children and whole families, have fought for years against pornography. 

They fought to protect innocents from assaults from predators whose arousal addictions began with Playboy and Penthouse magazines. They pleaded with lawmakers to protect women and children from the effects of pornography provided by taxpayers in local public libraries. 

Over twelve years ago, I was among several Illinois conservative women – who were thought to be prudes and pleasure-stiflers  – that marched with members of Rev. James Meeks’ Salem Baptist Church and Bishop Larry D. Trotter’s Sweet Holy Spirit Church around Chicago’s Harold Washington Library. 

An elder at Bishop Trotter’s church had been with his 8 year old son at the library, when his son and he came across a man viewing obscenity on a taxpayer-funded computer screen.  Outraged, the father told the story to his pastor, and Trotter rightfully spoke out to the Chicago press. 

Rev. Meeks proposed we begin printing out some of the scenes available on the library’s computer screens and stick them on the library’s walls to shame the library board. He and other pastors pled with the library board to protect their patrons. A library employee who felt threatened by the unfiltered pornography in the area for which she was responsible also appealed to the board, but all to no avail. 

The American Library Association, headquartered in Chicago, declared filtering Internet access was censorship, and something they refused to endorse, no matter who it offended. Unfiltered pornography access, paid for by Chicago taxpayers, stayed, while concerned parents with children they wanted to protect were dismissed. 

These same conservative women took their pleadings to the state legislature. They asked that Internet filters be placed on library computers. The American Library Association kicked its efforts into high gear, and shamed even family-oriented lawmakers away from voting to require obscenity filters on taxpayer-funded computers. 

These women, now grandmas, were mocked and ridiculed by librarians, the media and state lawmakers for simply trying to ward off part of the attack they knew could devastate the healthy heart and souls of the next generation. 

And here we are today — locking arms with the very ones we tried to protect. 

Now these young men, damaged by the foolishness of a generation unwilling to protect their own, are fighting back for their own sake. They are forming a new movement of ex-porn addicts that meet online to hold each other accountable and encourage each other away from Internet arousal addiction and onto healthy person-to-person relationships.  

October 27 to November 2, 2013, is White Ribbon Against Pornography (WRAP) week.  Whether you’re a grandma, an old-fashioned church lady, an awakened parent or a redeemed ex-porn addict, wear a white ribbon proudly.  

We’re all in this battle together — and there’s hope, no matter what the librarians and lawmakers say.

Please, click HERE to support IFI.

Thank you.

Morality In Media’s now three week-old boycott of Groupon, the online coupon company, is growing. Seven organizations with substantial membership have joined the boycott in the last week. More than 15,000 of Morality In Media’s own supporters have now contacted Groupon to cancel their memberships.  

Groupon’s support of porn producers Kink and Playboy caused MIM to initiate the boycott. “Why Groupon would find Kink to be an attractive business associate is puzzling,” said MIM’s executive director Dawn Hawkins, “because Kink brags that its productions include, ‘Girls … pulled in and out of cages, their tongues clamped, their bodies pinned, and their arms and legs strapped.’”  

Kink also claims to employ “contraptions used in countries such as China for torture” as well as “machines, water, metal, wood, electrodes, hooks, needles, and urination, all for the sexual persecution of women and ‘sexy, young teens.’”  

Groupon defends Kink, saying, “We thoroughly vet the businesses we feature…Fortunately, this business has proven to be a responsible member of their community.”  

“Playboy is no better than Kink,” Hawkins said. “It started the porn exploitation explosion.”  

Joining the boycott in the last week are Citizens for Community Values, Girls Against Porn & Human Trafficking, American Family Association of Kansas and Missouri, Louisiana Family Forum Action, Illinois Family Institute, Women for Decency, and Arizona Family Council.  

Groupon may be attempting to conceal its associations with sexually exploitative businesses, in response to the boycott. Advertisements related to Kink and Playboy have now been wiped from the company’s site though expired coupons for other businesses are still on the site. You can still see them HERE.  

“Until Groupon announces that it will no more support sexually exploitive businesses, the boycott will grow,” said Hawkins.  

A special “Boycott Groupon Project” page has been set up HERE.  There boycott supporters may also email all top Groupon executives, and call on them to reject partnership with businesses that glamorize the exploitation and abuse of women.  

About Morality in Media

Founded in 1962, Morality in Media, Inc. is the leading organization focused on opposing pornography and indecency through public education and the application of the law. www.PornHarms.com.