One of the goals of this blog is to expose hypocrisy and the Christofascists and other self-anointed "godly folk" never disappoint in providing a treasure trove of hypocrisy that needs exposing. Now, yet another study has found that the so-called Bible Belt is also the "Porn Belt" of America, meaning that the Bible Belt has the highest per capita number of porn searches in the country. Deliciously, internet porn searching correlates wonderfully well with where Southern Baptists represent the highest percentage of local church bodies. A piece in
Patheos looks at the phenomenon- which ultimately causes wrongheaded public polices - that needs to thrown in the faces of ranting Baptist pastors whenever they launch into homophobic rants. Here are article excepts:
According to a new study, the more you say you literally believe in the
Bible, the more you watch porn. At least that’s the inevitable
fact-based conclusion drawn from the biggest study of internet Google
porn searches by region.
In October, two Toronto researchers, Cara MacInnis and Gordon Hodson, published a study in
which they used Google Trends to analyze porn searches. Individual
search records are protected by privacy laws, but it is possible to
compare the popularity of search terms across various regions or states,
which is what they did.
Specifically, MacInnis and Hodson linked
state level information from Gallup polls asking about religious and
political attitudes together with a variety of sex and porn-related
search terms… their findings are in keeping with information from other
sources: Business professor Benjamin Edelman at Harvard found that
states with more traditional views of sex and gender have higher rates
of paid porn subscriptions—meaning people who are willing to put porn on
a credit card…
Smut in Jesusland: “The
honest truth is that we all have our failings, Christian or not,
liberal or conservative. None of us live up to our best intentions or
deepest values. What’s shameful is not the fact that people find sex
arousing and seek it out, even when they feel compelled to do so on the
sneak. The problem is hypocrisy and the way that it distorts public
policies and parenting, causing real harm to real people. For over a
decade, conservatives forced abstinence-only education on young people,
insisting that hormone-ravaged teens could ‘just say no’ when they
themselves can’t.”
This epic public health fail contributed to the United States having
the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world, with devastating economic consequences for young mothers and their offspring. Some thrive despite the odds; many do not. We can do better.
Denying young people information about their bodies doesn’t stop them from having sex. We know that. What it does is create a fog zone,
a “haze of misperceptions, magical thinking and ambivalence” that puts
teens at risk for sexually transmitted infections and surprise
pregnancy. Teens are notorious risk takers. The army sends recruiters
into high schools because at age 17 or 18 kids think bad things happen
only to other people. Or they simply don’t think. Cognitive
scientists tell us that the frontal lobe doesn’t develop fully until the
early 20s.
Add to that a conservative, paternalistic “virginity
code” that traces back to ancient times, layering shame, denial and
secrecy around sexual exploration. Religious and cultural codes prizing
virginity may once have helped to ensure that children were born only
when parents could provide for them. But in today’s world, an
antiquated purity myth can actually have the opposite effect…
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