By now it’s a cliché that liberalism in the Anglosphere has become a religion, whether or not its adherents know it. But less often remarked is a fact somewhat in tension with this claim: namely, that its worshippers get to be minor gods too, making up the moral rules themselves. The past few weeks have offered up two new case studies for us to contemplate. The first involves a married couple from the US, Malcolm and Simone Collins, described as the “poster children of the pronatalist movement”, now thrust into an even wider media spotlight courtesy of a viral Guardian interview about their lifestyle. The second is a book by political philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre, Liberalism as a Way of Life, published on Tuesday.

Since the article about the Collins family first emerged a fortnight ago, most scandalised public reactions have been about the fact that father-of-four Malcolm was observed slapping his toddler’s cheek in a restaurant — albeit that the reporter noted it was “not a heavy blow”. Collins said the practice was agreed with his wife beforehand and modelled on their having watched “tigers in the wild” disciplining their offspring with the swipe of a paw. (Let us hope they didn’t also see the part where an adult tiger sometimes kills a cub for food.) This week, he wrote a further defence, blaming “much of the media” for being “hell-bent on presenting pronatalists as evil and backward”. To my mind, though, Malcolm and Simone could do with being a bit more backward; for even leaving their disciplinary habits aside, they seem to constitute the reductio ad absurdum of attempts to freestyle the moral universe.

In the Collins’s world, every stage of the childrearing process is approached as if to be redesigned from scratch. For instance: the couple have given their two little girls “gender-neutral names” — Titan Invictus and Industry Americus — apparently on the grounds that this will make the girls “more likely to have higher paying careers and get Stem degrees”. The fact that future employers are bound to presume such names could only have come from a terrifyingly crazy bloodline seems to have been discounted. A further justification offered by Malcolm is that such “strong names” will predispose their owners to “a strong internal locus of control”: that is, to that inner feeling, identified by psychologists, of being fully in command of whatever happens to you in life, as opposed to a helpless passive drifter. Clearly, he hasn’t imagined having to spell “Titan Invictus” out over the phone.

Wrote for @unherd about the pronatalist Collinses, and the claim that liberalism could be a satisfying atheist religion if only we were devoted enough https://t.co/OzX9Nhzr83

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) June 7, 2024

….if the sexed nature of the body is irrelevant to the most intimate of human personal interactions, then who I am is detached from my body in a most fundamental way. I become something that inhabits my body and uses it as an instrument, not something that I am. In sum, one cannot desecrate the body and retain a stable notion of personhood any more than Nietzsche thinks one can kill God and keep the earth hitched to the sun.

If sex is no longer sacred, then practices relating to death have followed a similar path. Once it was a sacred mystery; now we mobilize social and technological forces to deny it. Violence and death, once too sacred to be depicted onstage in Greek tragedy, have become the trivial or pornographic fare of movies and video games. The Roman Colosseum made death a matter of entertainment; today, movies and video games bring pornographic violence into the living rooms, indeed the palms, of everyone with a television, a game console, or a smartphone.

Real death is a purely medical affair, with the dying placed in hospitals and hospices. The battle against the body is significant here too, for what is the final authority that the body possesses? Not to dictate our sex as male or female, but to dictate that we are mortal. In light of this, euthanasia looks like one last (and arguably futile) attempt to seize control of who we are.

The attempt to domesticate mortality continues after death. Churches are no longer typically built with graveyards, with the result that worship is today not experienced in the vicinity of dead loved ones. Funerals are becoming celebrations of life. Every year, cremations rise in popularity in America. There may well be practical reasons for this—cost, lack of space—but it still serves to incinerate any lasting, visible reminder from among the living of the dead as the dead. True, some have urns with the ashes of loved ones. But the jar on the mantel at home is different from—dare one say less sacred than?—a burial ground next to a place of worship. It is hard to maintain quiet reverence when the television is blaring and the kettle is boiling.

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Carl Trueman on the Desecration of Man. As usual, he's spot on. https://t.co/AxXHGY8XYS

— Mackenzie Boudreaux (@PaperandPipe) December 13, 2023

According to Philip Larkin, ‘sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three’. Until today, this sexual revolution, brought about by more effective forms of contraception, has been hailed as an emancipation of human beings. No longer were we subject to the restraints of traditional morality as policed by religious faith, and family mores. Instead, they could act according to our desires, to find pleasure and happiness in any way they saw fit. Why should society have any opinion on what happened between the sheets, as Stephen Fry once said?

In her provocative new book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry argues that the picture is far from rosy. Instead of liberation, society has created new forms of oppression: rough sex, hook-up culture, and pornography to name a few. She argues that in all of these women have been the losers. In her view, the much-touted concept of “consent” as the answer to everything has failed and we have arrived at a situation that benefits a minority of men, at the expense of women. 

Her book is fearless in attacking the current orthodoxy, using her own experience as a campaigner in a rape crisis charity, along with extensive research, and she ends the book by quoting the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin (to paraphrase), that it is a lie to equate sexual freedom with freedom. Instead, she offers one piece of advice, ‘get married and stay married’. That is an incredible statement from a secular author! 

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Incredible article from a secular feminist perspective on how our “sexual liberation” has betrayed women.

I may need to pick up @Louise_m_perry’s book “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution”https://t.co/8WGPOXxBa0

— Neil Shenvi (@NeilShenvi) June 4, 2022

The Government must legislate to compel age verification on pornography websites to protect children, the General Synod has urged.

In a debate on Monday night, prompted by a Guildford diocesan synod motion (News, 24 June), member after member rose to denounce pornography as degrading, exploitative, lascivious, and harmful.

When the motion was put to the vote, it passed overwhelmingly, with just two votes against and three abstentions.

Despite action being promised by David Cameron almost a decade ago, the Government has not yet brought in any regulation forcing porn providers to stop children accessing their services online….

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….in rationalizing our gambling regime by making it ever more universal, we’re following the same misguided principle that we’ve followed in other cases. With pornography, for instance, where the difficulty of identifying a perfectly consistent rule that would allow the publication of “Lolita” but not Penthouse has led to a world where online porn doubles as sex education and it’s assumed that the internet will always be a sewer and we just have to live with it. Or now with marijuana, where the injustice and hypocrisy of the drug war made a good case for partial decriminalization, but stopping at decriminalization may be impossible when the consistent logic of commercialization beckons.

The reliability of this process doesn’t mean that it can never be questioned or reversed. Part of what we’re witnessing from #MeToo-era feminism, for instance, is a backlash against the ruthless logic of an unregulated sexual marketplace, and a quest for some organic form of social regulation, some new set of imperfect-but-still-useful scruples and taboos.

But it’s a lot easier to tear down an inconsistent but workable system than it is to build a new one up from scratch — and the impulse to rebuild usually becomes powerful only once you’ve reached the bottom of consistency’s long slope.

I’m not sure where we are with gambling’s cultural trajectory. But every time this playoff season served up another ad for Caesars Sportsbook, it felt like a sign that we’ve accelerated downward, with a long way yet to fall.

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The damage from a growing gambling industry "is likely to fall disproportionately on the psychologically vulnerable and economically marginal, the strong preying on the weak,” writes @DouthatNYT. https://t.co/yST3quRFMM

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) February 13, 2022

“Do you want to see yourself acting in a movie or on TV?” said the description for one app on online stores, offering users the chance to create AI-generated synthetic media, also known as deepfakes.

“Do you want to see your best friend, colleague, or boss dancing?” it added. “Have you ever wondered how would you look if your face swapped with your friend’s or a celebrity’s?”

The same app was advertised differently on dozens of adult sites: “Make deepfake porn in a sec,” the ads said. “Deepfake anyone.”

How increasingly sophisticated technology is applied is one of the complexities facing synthetic media software, where machine learning is used to digitally model faces from images and then swap them into films as seamlessly as possible.

The technology, barely four years old, may be at a pivotal point, according to interviews with companies, researchers, policymakers and campaigners.

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Deepfake anyone: AI synthetic media tech enters perilous phase https://t.co/pLR50oOOCL pic.twitter.com/TmhvzmuiL7

— Andy Vermaut (@AndyVermaut) December 20, 2021

Read it all (content may not be suitable for some blog readers).

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Putting an end to sex trafficking requires shutting down commercial sexual exploitation in all its forms.https://t.co/heeO19j9qX

— First Things (@firstthingsmag) February 15, 2020

Abortion, pornography, drugs, homosexual relationships – these are some of the issues which most British people no longer consider to be “immoral”.

Kings’ College in London compared figures of 1989 with opinion polls conducted this year on a range of moral issues. In the last 30 years later, there has been a significant fall in the number of people who see gay relationships as morally wrong, down from 40% then to 13% today. The percentage of citizens who believe having children outside marriage is not moral is now 13%, down from 24% in 1989. On the issue of pornography, adult sex magazines were seen as immoral by 38% of the population 30 years ago, a figure that falls down to 22% (the biggest shift happening in the female population).

The number of people who perceive taking soft drugs such as cannabis as morally wrong has also collapsed. In 1989, it was 60%, now it is 29%. Even the consumption of heroin is now seen as acceptable by 33% of the population.

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LIFE & TECH: Only infidelity has not suffered a change in attitudes compared to 30 years ago, shows research conducted by King’s College London on a range of issues.
https://t.co/LaDWPSX4Lg

— Evangelical Focus (@Evan_Focus) October 28, 2019

The youngest Member of Parliament in Spain is leading an initiative to force porn websites operating in the country to install credible age verification systems.

The recently elected 26-year-old Andrea Fernández has called to end the “culture of porn” among young people which has lead in the last years to more than one hundred cases of so-called “manadas” (English: packs, herds) – groups of young men who plan to rape vulnerable women.

The limitation of pornographic contents online was included in the electoral programme of the the newly elected Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez (Social Democrats). The goal of the new government is to implement a new strict age verification system for these kind of websites. This has already been approved in the UK, with the support of 88% of parents.

The social debate about the role of pornography in the education of children becomes more important as new data of a research conducted by the Balearic Islands University among 2,500 people aged 16-29 showed a disturbing reality.

The report “New Pornography and the changes in interpersonal relationships” says some children are starting to consume pornography at 8. The average age for boys to start to consume pornography is 14, 16 for girls. The legal age required to access such contents is 18.

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Researchers contacted 410 senior ministers in 29 evangelical and mainline Protestant denominations, along with non-denominational congregations.

Pastors were asked about 18 issues, including marital infidelity, premarital sex, same-sex relationships, sexting, gender dysphoria and the use of pornography by husbands, wives, teens and young children. Among the findings:

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On Religion: Many pastors clueless when swamped with sex, tech issues https://t.co/6QZVWvvddo

— Ukiah Daily Journal (@UDJnews) January 19, 2019

The announcement was first reported by Business Insider and comes after a petition from internet-safety advocacy group Enough is Enough garnered more than 26,000 signatures.

The nonprofit launched a porn-free campaign aimed at McDonald’s and Starbucks in 2014, and it says that while McDonald’s “responded rapidly and positively,” Starbucks did not.

Starbucks said in 2016 that the company was “in active discussions with organizations on implementing the right, broad-based solution that would remove any illegal and other egregious content,” according to a statement Monday by Enough is Enough CEO Donna Rice Hughes. But they didn’t act, she said.

“Starbucks has had a tremendous opportunity to put its best foot forward in protecting its customers from images deemed obscene and illegal under the law, but they haven’t budged, despite their promise two years ago and despite the fact that they voluntarily filter this same content in the UK,” Hughes said in the statement.

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Starbucks says the company will start blocking pornography over its stores' Wi-Fi starting in 2019. https://t.co/KTZ5H3cb2m

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 29, 2018

Forty-three percent of Americans now believe pornography is “morally acceptable,” a seven-percentage-point increase from last year and the highest level since Gallup first began measuring moral perceptions of pornography in 2011.

These results come from Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs survey, conducted May 1-10. Since it was first fielded in 2001, this survey has found considerable evidence that Americans are becoming increasingly liberal in terms of what actions or behaviors they find morally acceptable.

From 2011 onward, notable shifts in opinion are apparent for actions such as doctor-assisted suicide, gay/lesbian relations, sex between unmarried people and having a baby out of wedlock.

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Pornography is “morally acceptable,” says…

43% Americans*
67% Males, 18-49
41% Females, 18-49
35% Married
50% Religion is fairly important

* 7 point increase from 2017

(Source: Gallup, survey conducted May 1-10, 2018 https://t.co/CHmJNTHqCF) pic.twitter.com/Fi83pcepwm

— Duke Kwon (@dukekwondc) June 6, 2018

73% of teenagers today have a smartphone, giving them access to all types of communication over text or social media. For many kids, that includes sexting—the sharing of sexual messages, images or videos—according to a new study.

The new report, published in JAMA Pediatrics, analyzed 39 studies with a total of about 10,300 young men and women under age 18. It found that sexting has become increasingly more common in recent years. Though the majority of teenagers don’t report sexting, 15% of teens say they send sexts and 27% receive them. The activity is also more common as young people get older, the study authors report.

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It was inevitable in the brave new post-Fifty Shades world. Internet searches of “porn for women” grew by 359 per cent last year, according to one of the genre’s most popular websites….

Laurie Betito, a sex therapist and director of the Pornhub sexual wellness centre, said: “2017 seems to have been the year where women have come forward to express their desires.

“From the ‘Me too’ movement to prominent females the likes of Hillary Clinton and Nikki Haley on the world stage, women are feeling more empowered and they have found their voice. This is a sign of things to come.”

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Pornographic content online gives boys a “warped” attitude towards women, a Church of England bishop has said, as he told Facebook it could not “shrug its shoulders” about its content.

Stephen Cottrell, the bishop of Chelmsford, said that it was “simply no good” for social media companies such as Facebook to say that they were “just a platform upon which others stand”.

“If they wished or if we made them, they could be a ticket inspector of that platform, offering proper control and management of content in all the various ways that our report outlines, such as the right to be forgotten, age verification, the removal of upsetting content, time out and so on.

“The technology is there. But they will not use it unless pressed,” he said.

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Now that death has taken him, we should examine our own sins. Liberals should ask why their crusade for freedom and equality found itself with such a captain, and what his legacy says about their cause. Conservatives should ask how their crusade for faith and family and community ended up so Hefnerian itself — with a conservative news network that seems to have been run on Playboy Mansion principles and a conservative party that just elected a playboy as our president.

You can find these questions being asked, but they are counterpoints and minor themes. That this should be the case, that only prudish Christians and spoilsport feminists are willing to say that the man was obviously wicked and destructive, is itself a reminder that the rot Hugh Hefner spread goes very, very deep.

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The share of Americans ages 25-34 who are married dropped 13 percentage points from 2000 to 2014. A new book by sociologist Mark Regnerus blames this declining rate on how easy it is for men to get off.

Regnerus calls it “cheap sex,” an economic term meant to describe sex that has very little cost in terms of time or emotional investment, giving it little value.

Regnerus bases his ideas, in part, on the work of British social theorist Anthony Giddens, who argued that the pill isolated sex from marriage and children. Add online pornography and dating sites to the mix and you don’t even need relationships.

The result is “two overlapping (but distinctive) markets, one for sex and one for marriage, with a rather large territory in between comprised of significant relationships of varying commitment and duration,” Regnerus writes in “Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy” (Oxford University Press).

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The age at which a male first sees pornography is associated with certain sexist attitudes later in life, according to a team of researchers from the University of Nebraska.

Their survey revealed the younger the first viewing occurred, the more likely a male was to want power over women.

While if they were older, they were more likely to be sexually promiscuous.

Of the 330 undergraduates surveyed, with a median age of 20, the average age they first saw pornography was 13.

The youngest was only five, while the oldest was 26.

The unpublished findings were presented at a convention in Washington.

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For moms like Stefany Rodriguez-Neely, Marianne Touger and Zakeia Smith, a sinister secret was lurking beneath the surface of their favorite spot online ”“ a website so popular, that more than 100 million use it each day.

“I was clueless. I was like, really?!” Smith told 8 On Your Side. “’Cause I think, when I think Pinterest, or one of those other sites, I think it’s all about crafting and recipes.”

Touger had the same response.

“It never occurred to me, never occurred to me that it would be a problem with Pinterest,” she said.

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The headmaster of Downside School has spoken out against suggestions that pornography should be taught in schools.

Following comments by the broadcaster and journalist Dame Jenni Murray, in which she said teenagers should watch pornography together and analyse it as though it was a Jane Austen novel, Dr James Whitehead said that promoting pornography goes against the ethos of gender equality.

During an appearance at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, Murray suggested schools “put boys and girls together in a class and you show them a pornographic film and you analyse it in exactly the same way as you teach them to read all the other cultures around them”.

But in a blogpost for the Independent Schools Council, Dr Whitehead said Jane Austen would be “appalled”.

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Read it all also from the Guardian.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Read it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

If anyone still had doubts about the addictive dangers of pornography, Anthony Weiner should have put paid to them with his repeated, self-sabotaging sexting.

And if anyone still doubted the devastation that porn addiction wreaks on those closest to the addict, behold the now-shattered marriage of Mr. Weiner and Huma Abedin, a breakup that she initiated, reportedly, in shock at the disgraced ex-congressman’s inclusion of their 4-year-old son in one lewd photo that he sent to a near-stranger.

From our respective positions of rabbi-counselor and former Playboy model and actress, we have often warned about pornography’s corrosive effects on a man’s soul and on his ability to function as husband and, by extension, as father. This is a public hazard of unprecedented seriousness given how freely available, anonymously accessible and easily disseminated pornography is nowadays.

Put another way, we are a guinea-pig generation for an experiment in mass debasement that few of us would have ever consented to, and whose full nefarious impact may not be known for years.

Read it all from the WSJ.

But if [Erik] Hurst’s research is accurate (and profit margins from the video-game industry suggest that it is), then the issue becomes much bigger than video games themselves. The portrait that emerges of the young American male indicates an isolated, entertainment-absorbed existence, with only the most childlike social ties (such as with parents and “bros”) playing a meaningful role.

Young men, significantly more so than young women, are stuck in life. Research released in May from the Pew Center documented a historic demographic shift: American men aged 18-30 are now statistically more likely to be living with their parents than with a romantic partner. This trend is significant, for one simple reason: Twenty- and thirtysomething men who are living at home, working part-time or not at all, are unlikely to be preparing for marriage. Hurst’s research says that these men are single, unoccupied, and fine with that””because their happiness doesn’t depend on whether they are growing up and living life.

This prolonged delay of marriage and relational commitment often means a perpetual adolescence in other areas of life. Love and sex are arguably the best incentives for men to assert their adulthood. But in the comfort of their parents’ homes and their gaming systems, young men get to live out their fantasies without the frictions of reality.

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Pornography is not new, but the digital age has made it more ubiquitous and accessible than ever before. The technological realities of smartphones and high-speed internet have fundamentally changed the landscape of pornography, and ushered it into the cultural mainstream where it enjoys increasingly widespread acceptance.

In Barna’s landmark study, The Porn Phenomenon (now available to purchase online), commissioned by Josh McDowell Ministry, we interviewed thousands of American teens, young adults and older adults about their views on and use of pornography. Here are ten of the most compelling findings:

1. There is Moral Ambiguity Toward Porn, Particularly Among Younger Americans
Perhaps the most sobering finding from the study is the reality of how accepted viewing porn has become in our culture today, particularly among teens and young adults. Around half of adults 25 and older say viewing porn is wrong (54%), and among teens and young adults 13-24, only a third say viewing porn is wrong (32%). This posture toward porn among younger Americans is confirmed by how they talk about porn with their friends: the vast majority reports that conversations with their friends about porn are neutral, accepting or even encouraging. They generally assume most people look at porn at least on occasion, and the morality of porn is rarely discussed or even considered. Just one in 10 teens and one in 20 young adults report talking with their friends about porn in a disapproving way.

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Topics Include:

Clergy burnout
Justification and judgement
Pornography research
Understanding Islam

Be on the lookout for it.

Naghmeh Abedini is looking forward to reuniting next week with her husband, Saeed, the Iranian-American pastor freed on Saturday after more than three years in an Iranian prison.

But she’s not rushing the reunion.

In an interview at her parent’s home in Boise, Idaho on Wednesday, Abedini said that rebuilding their marriage after her husband’s imprisonment will take time.

The relationship, she said, has been strained in recent months by the publication of an email she sent to friends and supporters late last year. Her note described “physical, emotional, psychological and sexual” abuse by her husband, who she said was addicted to pornography.

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Children and adults are being harmed by the widespread availability and use of pornography in society, the Bishop of Chester has warned.

The Rt Revd Peter Forster, leading a debate in the House of Lords on the impact of pornography on society, called for action in the face of evidence showing the damaging impact of pornograhy on adults as well as children and young people.

Speaking to peers, Bishop Peter highlighted the exposure of children to harmful sexualised content online.

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