The Shifting Narrative Around Pornography

JONATHON VAN MAREN MAY 28, 2025

There has been a fundamental shift in the public debate on pornography over the past decade. In 2017, I took the affirmative side in a radio debate with a queer studies professor on the question “Is pornography inherently harmful to society?” Much of what I highlighted then—the normalization and mainstreaming of sexual violence, pervasive porn addiction beginning in preadolescence, the consequent inability to engage in or even understand healthy intimacy—is now the position of panicky government officials from the U.K. to France. 

Hardly a week goes by without some news story highlighting the devastating effects of ubiquitous porn use across the West and beyond. Two reports from May alone highlight this fact with chilling clarity. 

The first is a disturbing report in the Guardian by Harriet Grant on the growing phenomenon of men who do not have the profile of a typical pedophile—a sexual interest in children—nonetheless being arrested for viewing and possessing child abuse material. These men ended up viewing child pornography when their addictions escalated and spiraled out of control. As one told her: “I didn’t start out wanting to see kids. I was addicted to porn and I went down a road of being totally desensitised as I got further and further from what was normal.”

In England and Wales, 850 men are being arrested monthly for “online child abuse offences.” Similar trends are emerging elsewhere. Grant notes that we face “a spiralling global crisis” with law enforcement and child protection experts consistently pinpointing one culprit: “the explosion over the past 10 to 20 years of free-to-view and easily accessible online pornography. . . .  A growing body of research is beginning to warn of how problematic porn habits can be a pathway into viewing images of children being abused.”

Grant observes that the explosion of extreme content, including child abuse imagery, is not merely feeding a demand but fueling one. Users crave porn for the dopamine; to achieve consistent arousal, they must escalate their usage; algorithms deliver a constant digital diet of depravity. Viewers have been pushed to edgy material for a long time (as evidenced by the “Barely Legal” phenomenon). As one man related: “You know it’s wrong, but the dopamine hit from what you are doing overrides everything else. I think the pathways in my brain had been changed by all the porn I had watched. . . . You feel sick and horrible.”

Significantly, most of the men who eventually encountered child pornography did not actually search for it. The Finnish group Protect Children profiled 4,549 anonymous child sexual abuse offenders and found that not only was pornography a key “facilitating factor,” but over 50 percent first saw child abuse material when they were not seeking it. Michael Sheath, who has worked with child abusers for more than thirty years, told Grant: “I see men who have gone down what I call an ‘escalating pathway.’ The link is unambiguous. . . . The threshold for abusive behaviour is through the floor. It used to be that child abuse material was hard to find and looking at it was extremely risky.” Not anymore.

“We are seeing people who are turning 18 and have had 10 years’ exposure to hardcore porn,” said Detective Chief Inspector Tony Garner, who heads a team of online child abuse officers in the U.K. “My officers are finding young people watching the most abhorrent material, including child abuse. . . . As a country, as a society, it feels completely out of control.” Meanwhile, Pornhub insists that it is not pushing viewers to increasingly extreme content, but that users merely “discover” new sexual themes.

A report in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof tells a different story. Kristof reviewed internal documents from Pornhub accidentally released by a federal district court in Alabama, exposing many internal discussions. One exchange between staffers read: “There is a LOT of very, very obvious and disturbing CSAM [child sexual abuse material] here.” Another document stated that as of May 2020, Pornhub “had 706,000 videos available on the site that had been flagged by users for depicting rape or assaults on children or for other problems.”

Despite that, many videos remained available; Pornhub “did not necessarily review a video for possible removal until it had been flagged at least 16 times.” Another private memo “acknowledged that videos with apparent child sexual abuse had been viewed 684 million times before being removed”; another featured managers recommending that words such as “brutal,” “childhood,” “minor,” and “unwilling” be permitted in video descriptions; a third note “says that a person who posted a sexual video of a child shouldn’t be banned from the site because ‘the user made money.’”

Many of the phrases Pornhub debated internally are too vile to print. Kristof reports that in 2020, “underage” turned up 183,301 videos on the site; 155,447 videos had the keyword “12yo.” Kristof concludes by stating that something clearly must be done about this crisis; he suggests that perhaps “we can use civil and criminal penalties to incentivize the pornography industry to show only videos for which the website has verified age and consent.” This proposal, while a step in the right direction, avoids the fact that porn use almost always escalates. 

A raft of recent age-verification legislation in the United States indicates that lawmakers are beginning to grapple with the social costs of pornography. Sen. Mike Lee went further, introducing the “Interstate Obscenity Definition Act” in May, which would include pornography under the category of “obscenity” and essentially render much of this material illegal. Lee’s proposal has been widely mocked, but those insisting on the necessity of protecting pornography in the name of free speech must be forced to answer key questions. 

Do we want to live in a society where it is normative for children to be exposed to extreme porn before puberty, and their libidos wired to respond to sexual violence? Where almost a quarter of adult American women reportedly “felt scared during sex” due to porn-inspired violence like choking? Where underage porn users are increasingly abusing other children? Where men are being transformed into sex offenders by pornography that is increasingly difficult to avoid? Where innocence is increasingly impossible?

These reports reveal the society we have chosen to create by prioritizing so-called “sexual liberty” over the safety and innocence of women and children. We now know where this social experiment has taken us, and what it has cost us. It is a growing consensus not just among conservatives, but across all fields, that pornography has been a tremendously destructive force. It is time to reverse our priorities, and to recognize that digital pornography is lethal poison in our cultural groundwater and should be treated as such.

 

Toronto Cardinal Leo tells Catholics to avoid using ‘symbols that do not represent us’

Cardinal Francis Leo of Toronto was created a cardinal by Pope Francis during the consistory at St. Peter’s Basilica on Dec. 7, 2024. | Credit: Daniel Ibañez/CNA

By Tessa Gervasini

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 2, 2025 / 18:07 pm

Archbishop of Toronto Cardinal Francis Leo called on the faithful to honor the most Sacred Heart of Jesus throughout the month of June rather than “using symbols that are contrary to God’s divine revelation.” 

“This year the solemnity of the Sacred Heart is commemorated on June 27, though the entire month is dedicated to this long-standing and much appreciated devotion in the Church,” Leo said in a statement. 

The month of June is a time to reflect on Jesus’ “loving, burning, sacrificial, and life-giving heart,” which Leo called “one of the most profound and enduring symbols in Catholic devotional life.”

For Catholics, symbols “help us to deepen our faith and shape our prayer life, not to mention the lives we lead and the choices we make,” the cardinal said. “They are like bridges joining together the material and spiritual worlds and reveal to us the Gospel truths.”

The month of June is also recognized in many cities around North America as “Pride Month.” Thousands of people gather throughout June to hold parades and parties that celebrate the LGBTQ+ community. 

Leo called on the faithful in Toronto to use symbols this month that “are consistent with our Catholic faith and not borrowed from ideological fora, promoted by lobby groups and endorsed by political movements.” 

He said: “We ought to honor and respect our traditions and not compromise the integrity of the faith by using symbols that are contrary to God’s divine revelation.”

“We do good to use our own symbols to tell our own story without resorting to trendy, misguided, and inadequate symbols that do not represent us as Catholics but rather contribute to confusion, distortions, and ambiguities about what the Catholic faith truly teaches regarding the human person, human nature, and natural moral law.” 

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The Sacred Heart of Jesus, which depicts “Christ’s physical heart, pierced and surrounded by thorns calling to mind his suffering and imbued with the inextinguishable flame of his love is ultimately the only symbol we really need,” Leo said.

“It is important for us to remember that the Sacred Heart does not merely refer to Jesus’ physical heart but to his entire interior life — his will, emotions, thoughts, desires, and love. It signifies the love that motivated the Incarnation, Our Lord’s earthly ministry, his passion, and ultimately the offering of himself on the cross for the redemption of the world.”

“Finally, during this month of June, I would encourage you to take time to renew your consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” Leo said. “If you haven’t already consecrated yourself, your family, and household to the most Sacred Heart, please consider doing so.”

 

St. Charles Lwanga and Companions, Martyrs of UgandaFeast day: Jun 03

St. Charles and many other martyrs for the faith died between November 15, 1885 – January 27, 1887 in Namugongo, Uganda. St. Charles and his companions were beatified in 1920 and canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1964.

In 1879 Catholicism began spreading in Uganda when the White Fathers, a congregation of priests founded by Cardinal Lavigerie were peacefully received by King Mutesa of Uganda.

The priests soon began preparing catechumens for baptism and before long a number of the young pages in the king’s court had become Catholics.

However, on the death of Mutesa, his son Mwanga, a corrupt man who ritually engaged in pedophilic practices with the younger pages, took the throne.

When King Mwanga had a visiting Anglican Bishop murdered, his chief page, Joseph Mukasa, a Catholic who went to great length to protect the younger boys from the king’s lust, denounced the king’s actions and was beheaded on November 15, 1885.

The 25 year old Charles Lwanga, a man wholly dedicated to the Christian instruction of the younger boys, became the chief page, and just as forcibly protected them from the kings advances.

On the night of the martyrdom of Joseph Mukasa, realizing that their own lives were in danger, Lwanga and some of the other pages went to the White Fathers to receive baptism. Another 100 catechumens were baptized in the week following Joseph Mukasa’s death.

The following May, King Mwanga learned that one of the boys was learning catechism. He was furious and ordered all the pages to be questioned to separate the Christians from the others.  The Christians, 15 in all, between the ages of 13 and 25, stepped forward. The King asked them if they were willing to keep their faith. They answered in unison, “Until death!”

They were bound together and taken on a two day walk to Namugongo where they were to be burned at the stake. On the way, Matthias Kalemba, one of the eldest boys, exclaimed, “God will rescue me. But you will not see how he does it, because he will take my soul and leave you only my body.”  They executioners cut him to pieces and left him to die alone on the road, which took at least three days.

When they reached the site where they were to be burned, they were kept tied together for seven days while the executioners prepared the wood for the fire.

On June 3, 1886, the Feast of the Ascension, Charles Lwanga was separated from the others and burned at the stake. The executioners slowly burnt his feet until only the charred remained. Still alive, they promised him that they would let him go if he renounced his faith. He refused saying, “You are burning me, but it is as if you are pouring water over my body.”  He then continued to pray silently as they set him on fire. Just before the flames reached his heart, he looked up and said in a loud voice, “Katonda! – My God!,” and died.

His companions were all burned together the same day all the while praying and singing hymns until they died.

There were 24 protomartyrs in all. The last of the protomartyrs, a young man named John Mary, was beheaded by King Mwanga on January 27, 1887.

The persecutions spread during the reign of Mwanga, with 100 Christians, both Catholics and Protestants, being tortured and killed.

St. Charles Lwanga is the patron saint of African Catholic Youth Action.

 

Canadian Doctors are Euthanizing Patients Who Aren’t Even Terminally Ill

International  |  Wesley Smith  |   Jun 2, 2025   |   6:19PM   |  Ottawa, Canada

The New York Times Magazine has a very long article out Sunday highlighting cases of nonterminally ill people being killed by doctors in Canada. It is too long to comment on the whole thing. (Please take the time to read it.) But one story described was so starkly abandoning, I have to bring it to your attention.

The story describes a woman named Paula, who seems to have been deeply depressed and experiencing chronic pain that could not be diagnosed. She had been abused by her father. She had attempted suicide more than once. After her mother died of cancer, she hit the skids, and she was on the verge of homelessness. Her life went into what would eventually become a literal death spiral. From, “Do Patients Without a Terminal Illness Have the Right to Die?”:

Paula stopped seeing her therapists and her social workers. She stopped seeing a family doctor because she couldn’t find one. She stopped taking mood stabilizers. She didn’t have a cellphone or a computer, and she spent hours a day just talking on an old black landline phone to people back in Perth. Still, Paula said, she was managing things — she was holding it together — until the concussion.

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She was beaten up by two women with whom she had been feuding at the housing complex, suffering a concussion, which caused her life to spiral even further. She wanted euthanasia. Tests showed no brain damage. But she was miserable and wanted to die. She went on a crusade to find a doctor — any doctor — who would approve her being killed by lethal injection under Canada’s “Track 2” euthanasia protocol for the nonterminally ill.

She finally found a death doctor who was willing to kill her, despite knowing that many of her problems were social:

Fundamentally, he [the death doctor] didn’t think the best way to protect poor and marginalized patients was to force them to stay alive, because in some counterfactual version of events, in which the world was a better and more just place, they might have chosen differently. That wasn’t how anything in medicine worked; a doctor always treated the patient as she was. How could it be otherwise? If only those who were rich or well connected were recognized to have autonomy and allowed to choose? . . .

He had read the report from Paula’s neurologist, which said that Paula did not have permanent brain damage and was not eligible for MAID. But he thought the specialist, who was not a MAID provider herself, misunderstood the eligibility criteria. There was nothing in the law that said that Paula’s neurological condition had to be tied to actual, physical damage to the brain. Paula’s pain was real either way. She felt it the same either way.

On the day of the homicide, Paula says she is “terrified.” Of course! She is about to be killed! A “pastor” arrives to “counsel” her. She pushes the killing! This made me regurgitate my lunch:

Then the minister walked in. Paula had spent days calling religious leaders and asking if they would come sit with her while she died. Some said they would not but that they would pray for her. Others wouldn’t even do that. But then, finally, someone agreed to come. She introduced herself as the Rev. Takouhi Demirdjian-Petro, from the United Church of Canada, and she was tall and sturdy, in a pink clerical blouse. She looked down at Paula and took stock of the tearful situation. “You’re in the hands of the everlasting love of God,” she said firmly.

Paula started to cry harder, until she was nearly convulsing. “God have mercy on my soul.”

“God is with you,” the minister said. “And he is guiding you.”

“What if I get lost?” Paula asked. “My mind doesn’t have a very good GPS. I’m scared of getting lost.”

“You won’t. I promise you, honey.” The minister told Paula that she had a vision of Paula’s mother waiting for her, like a mother might wait for her daughter at the airport. “And I’m not B.S.ing you. So just let go of this empty, empty world.”

The death doctor arrives:

For days, Paula had worried that, at the final moment, she would waver, as she did when she tried to take her life before: pick up the pills, put them down, pick them up again; wade into the river, swim back, over and over. She imagined that when Wonnacott reached for the syringe, she would flinch. But Paula was calm and still as the drugs went in. “I don’t feel anything,” she whispered.

“Oh, wow,” she said. “This is horrible. I’m just so sorry.” Paula coughed as if she might vomit. Deep, guttural hacks. After a few moments, her body relaxed. A wet tissue fell from her hands. Her skin slowly turned a pale white.

Soon, Paula is dead.

Paula is not an anomaly. I just interviewed a Canadian man named Roger Foley for my Humanize podcast. The episode will be posted in a week. He is in a hospital with a progressively disabling condition for which doctors, he says, have repeatedly pushed euthanasia on him for several years — as they concomitantly deny him the kind of care that would make his life easier to bear. I’ll link to that interview here when it’s posted.

I also included Alex Schadenberg, the founder of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, in the interview. He described how hospital “MAiD teams” visit patients who might qualify to be killed, offering their death services. Can. You. Imagine?

Euthanasia is awful “medicine” and even worse public policy. It exposes the most vulnerable among us to abandonment and death. It pretends to be kind. It claims to be compassionate. But in the end, it justifies the most callous cruelty.

LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D. is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement. He blogs at Human Exeptionalism.

 

REPOSTED

Wednesday, 29 March 2023

 Have you ever had some one say something to you that caused you to make significant changes in your life?

I have. Come back with me to 1980. In my first term as a teacher I had a row with the Head of Drama. During our exchanges he called me a mustachioed poseur. I was cut to the quick.

Over the next few days I, as well as shaving off my mustache, reflected that I indeed was a poseur. Some things about me were utterly fake. Take my accent; I had a perfectly normal middle class accent. However in my 'gap' year after university I worked on a London building site. The lads used to tease me about my 'posh' accent. I n response I cultivated what I would call an estuary/Cockney accent - something like the fake and phony accent Mick Jagger used to affect early in his career. I immediately dropped that and resolved that there would never again be anything phony in my life.

So I guess that I owe a lot to that Drama HOD - a Larry Grayson clone - for causing me to change things for the better.

Gene

 

Leo XIV and the Best-Case Scenario

DAN HITCHENS 

The philosopher Michael Oakeshott, the leading conservative thinker of his generation, regarded politics with distaste; he voted for the Tories, he said, “because they do the least harm.” The cardinals of the Catholic Church seem to have just acted on a similar basis.

Robert Prevost—as he was until yesterday—is unlikely to fulfill the liberal cardinals’ nightmare of a pope who would rip up Francis’s legacy. He seems to be well-liked by the more progressive cardinals—some of whom appeared beaming with delight on the balcony of St. Peter’s yesterday. But conservatives, too, expect a less harmful pontificate than a Pope Francis II would have delivered. Leo XIV’s first choices—the traditional name and traditional papal dress—are in themselves a retreat from his predecessor’s example. And he was, after all, spotted last week “entering Cardinal Burke’s house for a very secret summit.”

Trawling the Holy Father’s Twitter history, as one does, suggests a churchman who has made it to the age of sixty-nine without feeling any need to choose a side in the Catholic culture wars. Yes, he is outspoken on the rights of migrants; but he’s also seriously alarmed about the trans issue. Yes, he retweets the more progressive Catholic publications; but he also shares writings from the sturdily orthodox Cardinal George and Archbishop Chaput. Yes, he admires Pope Francis and likes the idea of “synodality”; but (unlike some people) he does not seem to regard either as a kind of inspired update on the gospel that calls into question what the Church has been doing for the last two thousand years.

To be clear, this is not a call for complacency. The Church is at an incredibly perilous moment, attempting to recover from a pontificate that actively fostered major doctrinal errors. If Leo XIV continues in this line, however cautiously and diplomatically, it means a deepening of one of the most severe crises in Church history. But you know all that already. So here is a case for optimism.

In interviews, the then Robert Prevost seems to gravitate naturally toward one theme: that it’s not about him. Interviewed as prior general of the Augustinians, he says members of the order are “called to live a simple life at the service of others.” As for his own spirituality, Prevost says it is inspired by St. Augustine’s Confessions—and once again he defines it in terms of self-abnegation. In a “highly individualistic” age, Prevost observes, people seek happiness in the wrong places. “Authentic happiness has to include others. And concern for others.”

As prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, Prevost sums up the bishop’s role as being “called to be humble and suffer with his people.” As cardinal, addressing parishioners at a Chicago church, he riffs for a little while before telling them: “I’m so convinced that if we open our lives and our hearts to serve others, we indeed—like the Gospel says—receive a hundredfold in this life. That certainly has been the case for myself.” Not wildly original content, I know, but the repeated theme is significant; and he doesn’t sound like he’s just saying it.

For twelve years, Catholics endured a pontificate in which a single person put himself at the center of events, so that even the law of Christ seemed less relevant than what feverish commentators referred to as “the agenda of Pope Francis.” It was an age when one leading episcopal ally of the pope said that “Whoever wishes to discover what the true will of Christ is for him, the true heart of Jesus . . . must ask the Pope. This Pope, not the one who came before him, or the one who came before that.”

A Vatican aide, meanwhile, claimed that Pope Francis “breaks Catholic traditions whenever he wants because he is ‘free from disordered attachments.’ Our Church has indeed entered a new phase: with the advent of this first Jesuit pope, it is openly ruled by an individual rather than by . . . its own dictates of tradition plus Scripture.” Those were extreme examples, but it was a trend. And the way Francis acted certainly encouraged such statements, by going to the verge of denying Church teaching and then treating reasonable concerns as unforgivable insults.

As Amy Welborn has brilliantly observed, the word “humility” has been thrown around a great deal of late. But in the context of Church leadership, humility is mostly about what you don’t do. “Not to impose oneself, one’s own identity and personal causes as superior, but to allow oneself, one’s talents, gifts and yes, concerns, to be absorbed into this Body of Christ, and be used by God in whatever way He sees fit. To allow oneself to be shaped and re-shaped, not to enter the embrace of St. Peter’s determined to do the reshaping in one’s own image.”

Perhaps Prevost knows this too. In his homily this morning, the new pope said that “first of all,” the papal mission is “to move aside so that Christ may remain, to make oneself small so that he may be known and glorified, to spend oneself to the utmost so that all may have the opportunity to know and love him.” If he actually does that—and as I say, I’m talking best-case scenario here—he will be a great pope.

Pope Francis was a man of formidable intellect, superhuman energy, and dazzling rhetorical gifts, who ruled with an iron will and altered everything he touched. He was the very image of a strong pope, and the result was a disaster. My prayer is for Pope Leo to teach us the meaning of humility; to make us understand the meaning of St. Paul’s words: “Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.”