Making Porn Pay
Rape and abuse victims may soon be able to hold the smut merchants responsible for their actions.
What made Steven Pennell kill? When police arrested the “Corridor Killer” after a series of attacks on women along a Delaware highway, they discovered a variety of violent pornography in his possession. One scene from a videotape was strikingly similar to the mutilation performed on Pennell’s victims. Did watching the movie inspire him? Are its producers and distributors somehow responsible for his crimes?
Yes, it did—and yes, they are—say proponents of the Pornography Victims’ Compensation Act. Their legislation would allow victims of sex crimes to sue producers and distributors of obscene material if they can prove reading or viewing it caused the attack.
Opponents fear the act might trample First Amendment rights by preventing the production and distribution of any sexually explicit material, such as Playboy. “But the bill is a lot more specific than that,” says Caran McKee, spokesperson for the bill’s cosponsor Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). It is aimed at legally obscene materials, which are not constitutionally protected.
Proving in court that consuming porn causes violent behavior is indeed difficult. Even the act’s proponents concede that. But legal questions, however pertinent, must not obscure the larger issues the legislation addresses. At root are three essential questions regarding moral responsibility and hard-core pornography.
Who are its victims? For every visual portrayal of a sexually violent act, a person—usually a woman—must be battered, tortured, or humiliated. An estimated one million children are sexually abused each year by pedophiles, who have no greater obsession—other than molesting children—than consuming child pornography, says Dean Kaplan, vice-president of public policy for the National Coalition Against Pornography. Male addiction to pornography in all forms is rampant; they, too, are victims of this great evil.
There are more hard-core pornography outlets than McDonald’s restaurants in America—and over 17,000 of those sell hard-core videos. “Evidence clearly shows that exposure to sexually violent materials is a causal factor in the commission of sexual violence against women, children, and even men,” says Kaplan.
Who is responsible? Promoters of the legislation want to hold accountable “those who are getting rich [$8 to $10 billion each year] off of veritable how-to manuals in films for rapists and child abusers,” says a spokesman for sponsor Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Even if that task is legally impossible in a court of law, it is morally a closed case.
Why be concerned about victims? Prior to the Norman conquest, crimes were considered offenses against individuals and violations of the community’s peace. But then legal theory began to consider crimes as offenses against the state. Thus Western civilization abandoned the biblical model of justice, which focused on restoring peace and compensating victims (see, for example, David’s judgment in 2 Sam. 12:5–6).
While the legislative future and the impact of the Pornography Victims’ Compensation Act remain to be seen, its introduction into public debate does serve as a reminder of the responsibility we have to all victims of crime. In that it encourages a more biblical view of crime and consequences, it provides an approach worth noting and repeating. Justice involves more than retribution. It aims, whenever possible, at reconciliation. Certainly compensation provides only a partial healing. But it is no small part in confronting the ugliness and harm of violent, hard-core pornography.
By the editors.
Living Like Gerbils*
For decades we have awaited the arrival of the leisure society. Futurologists have long dreamed of a world with little work to do. John Maynard Keynes, this century’s most influential economist, parodied the gospel in expecting his grandchildren to be like “the lilies of the field, who toil not, nor spin.”
Instead, we work longer and harder. Contrary to some Japanese opinions, Americans are not lazy but obsessed with work. Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American is a best seller, though probably few have time to read it. According to Schor, the average American paid work week is three hours longer than it was 20 years ago. Our “labor-saving” devices may make some tasks easier, but as a result, we simply do more things and work longer to pay for those devices. Faxes and cellular phones don’t free us from the workplace, they simply extend the workplace to anywhere we go.
There is also domestic work: cooking, cleaning, and childrearing. And when those burdens are combined with an outside job (women still do the lion’s share), life becomes a treadmill of to-do lists. We are harried and hassled, living like gerbils in their wheels, dashing madly and getting nowhere. If we took our worried eyes off Japan, we would notice that the supposedly workaholic Germans work only 37 hours a week and take five-week vacations. Americans are unusually driven.
Are Christians different? Yes. We are often worse. We have jobs and families like everyone else. But we also have the church: Sunday mornings, meetings many nights of the week, Bible studies, and Sunday-school lessons. We are called by workaholic pastors to be evangelists, good neighbors, and informed citizens.
Why do we live like this? Some, like single parents and the poor, have to. Others simply want more. And there are those more nobly motivated by a powerful vision of the needs of God’s world. Even so, we rest less than God does.
We work partly out of fear. Psychologist Barbara Killinger says “the workaholic is desperately afraid of boredom. He has to keep busy for fear of discovering himself.” We flee the self-knowledge and intimations of eternity that steal upon us if we are quiet and still. We also work to justify ourselves. Despite our claims of justification by faith, we tend to feel that our worth is shown in our exertion. We treat “works” solely as acts of penance and fail to realize that work of any kind will not rescue us.
According to the Scriptures, a major part of our calling is not only to work, but also to rest. For Israel, each seventh day and seventh year was a sabbath for the people, the animals, and even for the land itself. This cycle was tied intimately to trust in God. His people needed to trust that he would provide enough food to see them through (Lev. 25:18–24).
Resting is rooted in faith, which is one reason why many of us avoid it (Ps. 95:8–11). Genuine rest requires an acknowledgment that God, and our brothers and sisters, can survive without us. It hands over ultimate responsibility and surrenders to the ways of God. It is a celebration that acknowledges that blessing comes only from God’s hand. When we rest we accept God’s grace. We do not seek to earn, we receive. We do not justify, we are justified.
Doubtless there are many practical steps we can and should take to alleviate the plight of the overworked American. But without a genuine knowledge that our world, our lives, and our hopes are in God’s hand, those steps will amount to little more than additional things to do.
Guest editorial by Paul Marshall, Omar Good Visiting Distinguished Professor of Evangelical Christianity at Juniata College in Pennsylvania and professor of political theory at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto.
Why Not Kill Henry?
Daredevil children growing up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, in the fifties had a unique winter thrill: sledding at Kiwanis Park. Rather than a smooth, steep incline, the park had a terraced hill, its slope interrupted every few yards by a level shelf. The exhilaration of the ride derived not so much from its speed as from its bumps and jolts.
Our society’s moral plunge from the height of esteem for all human life may be like that hill—not a “slippery slope,” but a series of steps marked by the abandonment of specific principles.
Well, we just felt another jolt. In a recent “My Turn” column in Newsweek, a free-lance writer recounted the euthanasia of her ailing housecat and then asked, “Why can’t we treat fellow humans as humanely as we treat our pets?” Of course, we expected her to talk about aging and ailing human beings who should be allowed to die when and as they wish.
But instead of focusing on those who had lived a full life and were already on the threshhold of death, she recounted the story of Henry, a mentally impaired man whose violent outbursts made him impossible to employ or care for. He was now back on the streets. Wouldn’t he be better off dead? Why don’t we just kill him—gently?—she asked.
Rather than simply invoke images of Nazi experimentation on the mentally impaired, we would do well to note three key assumptions this author and others seem to make: that compassion necessarily requires relief from suffering; that human dignity is absent when impairment is severe; that social policies should be made to accommodate hard cases.
Many severely disabled persons in this country dispute those assumptions. They testify that the mercy they seek more than relief from suffering is a sense of meaning and acceptance; that social policies that may seem heartless in hard cases are the things that protect them from abuse; that they find dignity not in their ability to do anything but in the very fact of their being human.
If they are Christians as well, they find their dignity, acceptance, right to protection, and sense of purpose in the fact that they are created in the image of God. Those principles may be the brakes that can keep us from wildly bumping further down the slope.
By David Neff.
