The war on pornography rages on. Check out yesterday's AP article, "Activists Lament Porn's Move to Mainstream".

Apparently frustrated by that pesky First Ammendment, anti-porn crusaders are very busy developing new tactics to outlaw pornography. Their new strategy includes raising funds for brain research that proves that porn is physically harmful to humans. They hope their efforts will strengthen obscenity cases against adult industry defendants.

John Harmer, a Utah-based auto executive who has been fighting porn for forty years, summarized the game plan. "I'm convinced we'll demonstrate in the not too distant future the actual physical harm that pornography causes and hold them [the porn industry] financially accoutable. That could be the straw that breaks their back."

Whew. Fighting porn for forty years. John, you must be exhausted.

But seriously, this is the kind of devoted zealotry we've been facing in this country for two centuries. These people spend vast amounts of time, energy and resources fighting their personal demoms while under the delusion that they're working for the common good. They see porn as a manifestation of evil probably because their own secret desires are really dark and ugly.

That may be a presumptuous claim, but condsider the black and white inflammatory rhetoric the religious and moral right has been flinging around over the years. Anthony Comstock, the proto-typical anti-porn militant said in the late 1800's about obscentity, "Like a cancer it fastens itself upon the imagination, defiling the mind, corrupting the thoughts, leading to secret practices of most foul and revolting character, until the victim tires of life, and existence is scarcely endurable."

That was written over a century ago and relgio-reactionary conservatives are still operating from the same moral base. Activists like John Harmer would have us believe that porn is destroying the fabric of family values and now cite it as a reason American marriages are falling apart. What they fail to realize is that it is their own moral extremism that most contributes to sexual deviancy and is most likely responsible for the existence of modern pornography in the first place.

Paul Cambria, general council for the adult industry's advocacy group the Adult Freedom Foundation, has this to say. "The form of entertainment is no problem. There are individuals who are going to react abnormally to normal material, but it's not a problem for the average person." He goes on to say that "some people lie about it. It's their way of excusing personally unacceptable conduct-'It wasn't me-It was porn.'"

The sad and funny truth is that the villification of porn is a self defeating and futile strategy.

In 1969, Denmark became the first nation in the world to legalize pornography. Danish studies showed that although consumption of porn initially went through the roof, it has been on a long and steady decline ever since. After the porno wave had peaked a survey revealed that most Danes found porn to be "uninteresting" and even "repulsive". In fact, "the most common immediate reaction to one hour pornography stimulation was boredom," said Berl Kutchinsky of the Uninversity of Copenhagen.

So bring it on Mr Harmer, because as an aspiring pornographer the results of that research scare me a whole lot more than you do.

Sources: Associated Press 4/1/06; 'Reefer Madness', Eric Schlosser.