Recent headlines about pornography use at the Securities and Exchange Commission stirred public disgust with government officials who viewed thousands of hard-core images while Wall Street banks imploded.

Yet experts and religious groups that have struggled for years to raise awareness about the destructive consequences of pornography use hope the news will contribute to a sea change in social attitudes.

In fact, anti-pornography crusaders received another boost from the American Psychiatric Association, which just released new draft diagnostic guidelines that identified pornography addiction as a form of “hypersexual disorder” and thus worthy of serious study and treatment.

The breakthrough at the American Psychiatric Association provides additional context for a new report endorsed by a broad swath of academic leaders: “The Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and Recommendations.”

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(Please note that the title above is the one in the print edition of the paper–KSH).

To the wide array of programs offered by evangelical megachurches like Westside, the group adds what Ms. Renaud says is something long overdue. While churches have addressed pornography use among the men in their congregations and among the clergy, a group for women who say they are addicted to pornography is new territory, she said.

“In the Christian culture, women are supposed to be the nonsexual ones,” said Ms. Renaud, who also runs an Internet site called Dirty Girls Ministries, choosing the name to attract people searching for pornography. “It’s an injustice that the church is not more open about physical sexuality. God created sex. But the enemy has twisted it.”

Ms. Renaud, who is taking a DVD course in sexual addiction counseling from the American Association of Christian Counselors, said she started the group and the Web site based on her own experiences. She became interested in pornography at age 10 after finding a magazine in her brother’s bathroom. After that, she said, “I wasn’t able to get enough of it.”

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When Amy was a little girl, her uncle made her famous in the worst way: as a star in the netherworld of child pornography. Photographs and videos known as “the Misty series” depicting her abuse have circulated on the Internet for more than 10 years, and often turn up in the collections of those arrested for possession of illegal images.

Now, with the help of an inventive lawyer, the young woman known as Amy ”” her real name has been withheld in court to prevent harassment ”” is fighting back.

She is demanding that everyone convicted of possessing even a single Misty image pay her damages until her total claim of $3.4 million has been met.

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Researchers were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users.

But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not been seen it.

“We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. “We couldn’t find any.”

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One week from today, the star of “Luau Orgy,” “Gazongas” and the ahead-of-its-time “Wanda Whips Wall Street” will walk onto the campus of Truman State University in Kirksville to debate a pastor on the subject most dear to his heart: porn.

It will fall to the Rev. Craig Gross to rebut actor Ron Jeremy’s arguments that pornography is a harmless activity that most people pursue in the privacy of their own homes.

“If Ron was right, I wouldn’t have a job,” said Gross, founder of XXXChurch.com ”” a Christian website dedicated to battling pornography. “Porn rips apart homes and families.”

The Truman State debate is just one upcoming anti-porn event organized by local Christians. Such events reflect mounting distress among Christians over pornography’s growing technological reach.

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Take the time to watch it all, there is much to ponder here (Please note: because it is set in Las Vegas some of the images are less than helpful for the much younger blog reader). An excerpt from this was used this past Sunday in the sermon by yours truly–KSH

The 300-member congregation recently bought the former Playtime Drive-In movie theater to develop as their meeting place, and it held a bit of a surprise for staff members when they closed on the sale: cases and cases of pornography from the 1970s and 1980s.

“Obviously, we knew the right thing to do would be to destroy it, and not let it ever be out on the market, so to speak,” senior pastor Mark Eldredge tells NPR’s Melissa Block.

Read or listen to it all.

Got two words for you this week: Canadian porn.

I don’t think I need to write anything else. I’ll just let you think about that, and I can log off and head home early. Sometimes the universe hands you a lovely gift with a big bow on it, which makes a nice change from all the days the universe jumps out from behind something and stabs you in the head with a railroad spike.

OK, OK, I realize I can’t dangle a non sequitur like “Canadian porn” in front of you and then walk away from it. Send the kids out for ice cream and draw the curtains.

We all know that a lot of Canadian actors have come to New York or Hollywood to realize their dreams. I have no clue how many have come down here to the States to make it big in the porn biz, but if all goes according to plan, they won’t have to. They will soon have their own channel, specializing in skin flicks with no tan lines.

The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission has granted Alberta-based Real Productions approval for a digital pornography channel. It’s to be called Northern Peaks.

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California state lawmakers are considering an unusual idea to solve the state’s huge budget shortfall: Tax pornography.

The idea was proposed by a state assemblyman, and would impose a 25 percent tax on the production and sales of pornographic videos — the vast majority of which are made in southern California.

Read the whole article.

In 2002, the court struck down parts of the Child Pornography Protection Act that banned images that appeared to be explicit depictions of children, even if they were actually pictures of adults or computer-generated images. Banning images in which there are no real children, the court held, violates the First Amendment.

After that ruling, Congress passed a new law with its own problems. One provision punished anyone who “promotes” material in a manner “intended to cause another to believe” it is child pornography. That, once again, sweeps in fake child pornography ”” which is just what the court in 2002 said must be avoided.

This time, the court upheld the law by a 7-to-2 vote. That creates a bizarre contradiction. Fake child pornography is protected, but marketing fake child pornography is not. As Justice David Souter noted in dissent, it makes no sense to criminalize proposing to sell items that are themselves constitutionally protected.

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The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a 2003 federal law aimed at child pornography, concluding in a 7-to-2 opinion that a federal appeals court was wrong to find the law unconstitutionally vague.

The law in question arose from a sensible, constitutionally acceptable approach by Congress to correct faults that the high court found in an earlier child-pornography law, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court.

“Child pornography harms and debases the most defenseless of our citizens,” Justice Scalia wrote. “Both the state and federal governments have sought to suppress it for many years, only to find it proliferating through the new medium of the Internet.”

The ruling scathingly rejected contentions that the 2003 legislation was so broadly written that it could make it a crime to share or even describe depictions of children in explicit sexual situations, even if the depictions are inaccurate, the children do not really exist and the intention is innocent.

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Australian bishops are educating the faithful about the possibilities and dangers of the Internet, and doing so with their own Internet ventures.

A pastoral letter called “Internet Safety” marks World Communications Sunday, celebrated in Australia this Sunday. And the letter has a unique element — a video introduction featuring Bishop Peter Ingham on YouTube.

Bishop Ingham, the Australian bishops conference’s delegate for media issues, said the video is a way to get the message out.

“That’s where we have to be, if we’re going to be talking to people, especially to young people about navigating the Net safely,” he said. “If only a few people see this video message and think over the points raised, it will be most worthwhile.”

Read it all and Check this out also.

Watch it all (and please note it is only appropriate for certain audiences). Pornography is also the topic of the cover story of Christianity Today this month (not yet available on the web).

The increasing use of pornography is creating not a few problems. Late last year a judge in Melbourne, Australia, sentenced a man to 11 years in jail on a rape charge, reported the Age newspaper on Jan. 3.

Judge Damian Murphy, said that the Andrew Bowen had acted out a fantasy seen in material downloaded from the Internet.

The article’s authors, Maree Crabbe and David Corlett, commented that one consequence of Internet-based pornography is a shift to more extreme and violent sexual imagery. Scenes that are so degrading and humiliating that they would be banned from film and television are now freely available to anyone with a Web connection.

Crabbe and Corlett said that research shows a link between consumption of pornography and male sexual aggression. Even when the pornography is not violent, exposure to it tends to increase in the viewer tolerance of sexual violence.

Earlier last year a report published in Australia revealed record numbers of visitors to porn Web sites. According to a May 26 article in the Sydney Morning Herald, a survey found that 35% of Internet users had visited an “adult” site at least once in the preceding three months.

According to the article, psychologists and counselors say Internet pornography is a growing cause of marital problems due to increasing numbers of men who become compulsive users.

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Warning: this article’s content may not be suitable for some blog readers.

n his remarkable twenty-year career as a New York Times business journalist, Kurt Eichenwald has seen himself as a kind of crusader””shedding light on the world’s dark places, uncovering wrongdoing, bringing criminals to account. Lately, however, the pursuer feels like the pursued. “I had no idea of what I was taking on. I had no idea of the magnitude of the evil of these people,” he tells me. “This is an organized-crime business, these are people””we’re not talking about people with an affinity for Scotch””they spend their days talking and living and breathing the sexual issues of children.”

Two years ago, Eichenwald wrote a sensational front-page story in the New York Times about Justin Berry, a teenage pornography star who ran an enormously lucrative business from his room while his mother thought he was doing homework. The article resulted in congressional hearings, arrests, book-and-movie interest, and an Oprah episode. Eichenwald followed that first story with disturbing reports about illegal child-modeling Websites and self-help chat rooms where child molesters perfect their strategies. The Berry piece was impressive in its vividness. Law-enforcement agencies seized upon it as the definitive word about a sordid, teeming underworld, and parents inclined to worry about the dangers of the Internet were given reason to worry much more.

As much as the stories provided a window into a seldom-seen world, they also raised troubling questions about how they were reported””and ultimately about the man who reported them. To start with, Eichenwald made himself a character in the story about Berry””highly unusual for the New York Times. The reporter appeared as a savior, working to win Berry’s trust and finally rescuing him from the business he’d fallen into and delivering him back to his religious faith. But once Eichenwald became part of the story, others began to ask questions: Why would a Times reporter believe he should go into the rescuing business? And how had he accomplished what he’d accomplished? (Reporting on child pornography is inherently difficult, because looking at the images themselves is illegal, even for a journalist.) And behind those questions is a more fundamental one: What drives the people who fill these roles, criminal and pursuer, obsessive fan and obsessive foe?

With the country’s vexed relationship to youthful sexuality as the backdrop, Eichenwald’s stories, hectoring as they were about the evils they were uncovering, had a kind of prurient power that is undeniably related to the power of pornography. The cure and the disease are impossible to separate.

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The Supreme Court today will take up a First Amendment test of Congress’ ability to tackle child pornography in the digital age.

Justice Department lawyers defending a 2003 law that criminalizes the advertising of purported child porn say such Internet ads fuel the market for smut and hurt children even when the advertised pictures are fake.

Challengers to the law, including the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, counter that it sweeps too broadly. They say it threatens the marketing of Lolita and other fictional depictions of adolescent sex.

At stake is Congress’ latest attempt to prohibit sexual content on the Internet. Backed by 28 states, U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement stresses the need to curtail the marketing of child porn to protect the children abused to create it.

Clement, who will argue the case today, stressed in a written filing that because of the Internet “the distribution of child pornography has expanded exponentially.” He said even fraudulent offers to buy or sell child porn feed the market.

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More than a decade after employers began cracking down on those who view online pornography at work, porn is continuing to create tension in offices across the nation ”” in part because laptop computers, cellphones and other portable devices have made it easier for risk-takers to visit such websites undetected.

Devices providing wireless access to the Internet appear to be giving the porn-at-work phenomenon a boost even as employers are getting more aggressive about using software to block workers’ access to inappropriate websites. About 65% of U.S. companies used such software in 2005, according to a survey by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute, up from 40% in 2001.

Many employers say that because it’s so easy to access porn on portable devices ”” even those that are company-owned and outfitted to block access to adult-oriented websites ”” they are increasingly concerned about being sued by employees who are offended when co-workers view naughty images.

With wireless devices, close monitoring of workers is “impossible. There’s nothing you can do,” says Richard Laermer, CEO of the public relations firm RLM. “Liability is the thing that keeps me up at night, because we are liable for things people do on your premises. It’s serious. I’ll see somebody doing it, and I’ll peek over their shoulder, and they’ll say, ‘I don’t know how that happened.’ It’s like 10-year-olds. And it’s always on company time.”

Through the years, surveys have indicated that many workers run across adult websites or images while at work, but few say they have done so intentionally.

About 16% of men who have access to the Internet at work acknowledged having seen porn while on the job, according to a survey for Websense by Harris Interactive in 2006. Eight percent of women said they had. But of those who acknowledged viewing porn sites at work, only 6% of men and 5% of women acknowledged that they had done so intentionally.

Read it all from the front page of today’s USA Today.

Ten guys plop themselves into chairs and sofas arranged in a circle at Eastside Faith Center in Eugene. One of them pulls out a guitar and strums the chords of a hymn. Others close their eyes, nod their heads and quietly sing along.

Common bonds bring these men together each week. They are the bonds of faith and fellowship and pornography.

Participants in this “For Men Only” accountability group vary in age, temperament and work status. But most will tell you, privately, that they share the same problem with pornography: They want to stop using it but can’t, and need the help of God and others to quit.

“You have made the way to take our shame away,” says the guitar player in an opening prayer. “Lord, I’m living for you, to be worthy of you, regardless of my situation today.”

No religious or other demographic group is immune from pornography’s reach – not in a country where an estimated 40 million adults say they regularly visit porn Web sites on the Internet. In one survey cited by Internet Filter Review, an oft-quoted resource on cyberporn, 47 percent of polled Christians describe porn as a major problem in the home.

Read it all.

…but hold it just a minute there, folks. Haven’t we heard this trope before? About a guy named McGreevey? And remember how that ended–much ado about nothing?

Well, it turns out that’s what we’ve got here: some incredibly sloppy reporting that’s frankly unworthy of the venerable New York Times.

Your epiScope editor, who spent her youth as a reporter when Woodward and Bernstein were the heroes, decided to track down what really happened by talking to Mr. Boyer’s rector, the Rev. Hank Mitchel–which is more than reporter Waxman managed to do. Let’s go through the story, bit by painfully distorted bit.

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From the New York Times:

SOME people have their midlife crisis in reverse, like Ronald Boyer, who for most of his professional life has been better known as a star of pornographic films, Rod Fontana.

After 30 years of sowing the wildest of oats, Mr. Boyer, 54, has searched his soul and chosen, to the surprise of family and colleagues, to seek a priesthood in the Episcopal Church.

From his work in the rented villas of the San Fernando Valley, where hard-core sex films are shot, he has moved just a short distance west, to the Church of the Epiphany, which is guiding his transformation from pornography star to preacher.

The psychic distance, however, has been vast. In January, the lumbering 6-foot-3 performer was greeting fans on the red carpet of the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, along with the superstars of pornography like Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy.

In June, he was carrying the Holy Bible and a text titled “Gospel Light” to a live Internet show where he preached on the relative evils of pornography. “Is pornography a sin?” he asked on the show, which is aimed at people in the sex industry. “Probably. Definitely,” he answered, a response that reflected his own ambivalence as much as a desire not to alienate his audience. “So is eating carrot cake until you’re sick to your stomach,” he continued. “And so is punching somebody in the face. That’s a sin.”

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Three million and growing: That’s the number of Web clicks on a steamy promotional video on the European Union’s new link to YouTube. Two hundred and crawling: That’s the number of clicks on an EU road-safety video. Sadly, the EU has fallen for the tawdry marketing motto that sex sells.

First, a little background. The EU has a tough time selling itself to skeptical Europeans. In 2005, the French and Dutch rejected a proposed EU constitution, and the continentals are pushing back at the idea of adding more members to this club of 27 countries.

But in the cultural realm, apparently, it’s easier to make the case for togetherness, especially when it’s spiced with a 44-second sprint through 18 torrid sex scenes taken from European films. The clip is one of five that advertise the EU’s support for European cinema.

Moral objections to the vulgar snippet have been especially strong in heavily Roman Catholic Poland. But the official EU response is to decry the criticism as an “outbreak of prudery,” and a comment that “the European Union is not the [American] Bible Belt.”

What a tired defense….

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Sheryl and Paul Giesbrect are preparing to celebrate their 26th wedding anniversary. The sweethearts cherish their life together, which began when they met while attending a Christian university.

It’s where they found religion and each other. Today, Paul is a minister in California and Sheryl broadcasts spiritual messages. Both counsel troubled couples, but now they find themselves in need of counseling. Their marriage holds a secret, one the 50-year-old parents of two say rattled their union.

For 10 years, Paul kept the fact that he was addicted to Internet pornography a secret from Sheryl.

“The temptation will be with me until the day I die,” Paul said.

Sheryl was shocked by the revelation. “I said something like, ‘Well, that’s just disgusting.'”

To help themselves and their marriage, the Giesbrects met with psychoanalyst Bethany Marshall. They allowed ABC’s “Good Morning America” to watch them for their first time on the opposite side of the couch.

The sessions yielded surprises from the start, like how often Sheryl dwells on her husband’s obsession.

She said she spent two hours a day thinking about it.

“I thought you were going to say five minutes a week,” her husband said.

When Marshall questioned Sheryl on what she thought about specifically, she admitted wondering about how often her husband was tempted.

“She questions whether their lovemaking will be enough,” said Marshall.

“I feel angry about it. I can’t say, ‘Well, this is your problem. Do something about it,'” Sheryl said.

Marshall said Sheryl couldn’t hold other people responsible to fix her marriage problems, “because you’re not healing him. You’re feeding into the addiction.”

Read it all.