GOP Platform Identifies Pornography as a National Public Health Crisis
Forget about Zika and women’s health issues, forget about the gun epidemic, or any other leading cause of death in the country, the zealots in charge of the GOP platform would rather focus on porn.
According to Goodwin, the stronger language, identifying porn as a “public health crisis,” was pushed by a North Carolina delegate named Mary Forrester at the behest of the conservative Christian group Concerned Women for America. This quite a step beyond what the 2012 GOP platform document had to say about pornography, which I can quote in its entirety:
We urge active prosecution against child pornography, which is closely linked to the horrors of human trafficking. Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced.
Whether or not pornography can be considered an “insidious epidemic,” as Forrester argues, I’d wager that it hasn’t really been the most pressing concern for most Americans lately ― nor has it made many headlines. Of course, one public health crisis that has made headlines, and that does have a lot of Americans feeling sick and scared and helpless, is gun violence ― especially in the form of mass shootings, which have surged even as overall gun violence has declined.
How do we reconcile the rise in mass shootings with the larger, more encouraging downturn in gun violence? And would it be possible, perhaps, to address mass shootings from a health policy perspective? Might that possibly be an avenue worth exploring if it means we could prevent even one more life from being brutally abbreviated?
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