Banning pornography

[sw85]

Someone told me Catholics are supposed to support making pornography illegal. Is this true?

Yes.

How would you even approach such a monumental task as banning porn in a country the size of the US? Even if you have all American ISPs filter pornographic content, people will simply be able to circumvent the restrictions using unrestricted servers in other parts of the world. Add to that, we already have the largest prison population in the world. How are we going to go about investigating, prosecuting, and imprisoning millions of new criminals?

Right now pornographers are losing money because of the wide availability of free porn on the internet. If pornography is made illegal it doesn’t mean that porn will stop being produced, it just means that it will be more expensive and more profitable. So on top of trafficking narcotics we will just give organized crime another profitable enterprise to go in.

Completely impractical idea.

Doesn’t matter – it is morally obligatory.

Here’s a thought exercise. Take two free cities, neither of which experience any murder. In one city, murder is prohibited by law; in the other, it isn’t. Which society is morally superior?

Obviously, the former – it is only in this city that the right to life is acknowledged and respected. That the law itself has no practical impact is immaterial: it is itself a thing of value.

Regarding infiltrator, I have no interest in piling on, but please repent of your errors… what you are saying is flatly contrary to Church teachings and you are bordering on sin by publicly attacking its positions.

 

[Matrix_Refugee]

Before you can make pornography illegal, you must first have a definition of it that will stand up in court. No one has yet been able to come up with a legal definition of pornography.

Exactly: some people are so hung up about it that they’d ban Renaissance paintings and sculpture (the Sistine Chapel Last Judgment, anyone?? That already suffered from some bad censorship, when a painter was hired to paint over all the uncovered boy and girl bits). Or medical textbooks dealing with the reproductive organs. For that matter, there was a funny story about a French priest who read some lines of what sounded like erotic poetry at a couples’ seminar, then stunned the audience by telling them he’d just read from the Song of Solomon.