Porn DECREASES CRIME vs. FBI's Porn Squad

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Porn DECREASES CRIME vs. FBI's Porn Squad

Since it's won the War on Drugs and has just about won the War on Terror, the Bush administration has officially declared a War on Pornography.

The FBI has been instructed to divert agents and support staff into a special anti-obscenity squad, which will gather evidence against "manufacturers and purveyors" of pornography–made by grown-ups, for grown-ups, featuring grown-ups. Otherwise known as Your Legal Entertainment.

The Bureau's Washington Field Office describes this initiative as "one of the top priorities" of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In all fairness, we should note that "Congress has directed the Department to focus on other priorities [besides terrorism], such as obscenity," according to Justice Department press secretary Brian Roehrkasse. Sure--every hour the FBI spends looking at Jenna Jameson is an hour less they can chase down Congressional campaign bribes and ethical violations.

Anti-porn advocates use the tired old Big Lie that the government should crack down because pornography can turn people into sexual predators. But the science--not that the Bush Administration or so-called "morality" groups have any use for science--clearly contradicts this fear.

In a 1991 study, Dr. Berl Kutchinsky of the University of Copenhagen showed increased access to porn did not lead to increased sex crimes in the United States, Denmark, Sweden and West Germany. Eight years later, a lengthy paper by Dr. Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii Medical School validated that study. "It is clear from our data that a massive increase in available pornography in Japan has been correlated with a dramatic decrease in sexual crimes," he said.

If porn use created sexual predators, the U.S. would have tens of millions of them, and they'd be easy to identify. According to the FBI, we don't, and they aren't.

The anti-porn movement isn't about crime, or "the children," or those poor exploited actresses. For the religious Right, it's about sex: sex for pleasure, sex for money, sex as a way of exploring the world or affirming your personhood. And they want it stopped.

If the FBI fired every one of its officers who uses porn at home, it could no longer function. Until Congress is ready to mandate that, it should leave the rest of America's 50 million porn users alone.

"Reprinted from Sexual Intelligence, © Marty Klein, Ph.D. (www.SexEd.org)."