There is a lot of talk about the homosexual abuse scandal in the Church taking place. But while ignoring the homosexual aspect, there is also another major court decision that just took place which has opened the way to the legalization of pedophilia and child pornography that is hardly being talked about:
A federal court ruling earlier this month scrapped important regulations on the pornography industry, a move anti-porn advocates say will likely increase the production and distribution of child porn.
Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Pornography Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, together with University of Massachusetts-Boston professor David L. Levy, explained in a Thursday essay in The Conversation that an August 3 court decision effectively dismantled U.S. Code Title 18 Section 2257. This section required producers of pornography to maintain strict records regarding the ages of the porn actors in their films and to allow government inspectors to review those records at any time.
Although producing and distributing child porn is still against the law, without record keeping requirements the statute is essentially powerless, Dines and Levy argued, as such requirements are “the only way to verify and track performers’ ages and serves as a major incentive for businesses across the complex supply chain to monitor content.”
The recent ruling thus allows porn producers to use an age verification form produced by the Free Speech Coalition, the lobbying arm of the adult film industry which lauded the court’s decision. It is unclear whether the Department of Justice will appeal the ruling and if they do not it will stand.
Dines and Levy believe Section 2257 is now in serious jeopardy, based on conversations they have had with legal experts.
“A lot of the lawyers that I’ve spoken to did say it’s pretty much a rabbit hole of law. So it might be better for us to think of another way to try and prevent children from being used in pornography,” Dines said in Friday phone interview with The Christian Post.
When asked what might be done at the congressional level to address this she replied that it is too early to say but said that what is needed is to assemble a team of high-powered lawyers to figure out a way forward. Dines is particularly concerned that what are known as “secondary producers,” which includes internet porn distributors, are off the hook with this ruling.
“We’ve got to act quickly because I don’t trust them to not be uploading images of children,” she said.
Yet an even larger problem remains, as the porn industry lobby feeds outlier research that coheres with their preferred narrative to mainstream media outlets despite four decades of research spelling out the many ways pornography harms people, especially children, she stressed.
“You can always find junk science to disprove the weight of the evidence,” Dines said of their tactics, “but if people really knew what the science said, the impact of pornography on children, on adults, on women in the industry, there would be a national outcry. It’s just that it’s really hard to tell the story as it really is given that we have a media that seems hellbent on legitimizing junk science.”
And because the Free Speech Coalition is saturated with millions of dollars and is effective at getting news stories legitimizing porn placed, they function like a “well-oiled public relations machine” for the industry, she explained.
“Those of us who are anti-porn don’t have those kinds of resources to punch out the stories like they do. If we had their resources, then we could have a proper conversation in the media,” Dines said.
Failure to comply with section 2257 has resulted in steep penalties for porn producers. Most famously, in 2006 the company that made the “Girls Gone Wild” video series was fined $2.1 million dollars for Section 2257 violations. While relatively few prosecutions have occurred, such penalties do serve as a vital deterrent, Dines and Levy noted Thursday.
Interestingly, Judge Michael Baylson of the U.S. 3rd Circuit of Appeals, who ruled against the contested Section earlier this month, upheld it in a 2013 ruling. In that ruling five years ago Baylson referenced the strength of Dines’ and Levy’s research which showed that, contrary to the assertions of the porn industry, “teen porn” and other similar genres that featured young-looking females had grown to be approximately one-third of all internet porn in terms of both search-term frequency and proportion of websites.
“[F]or reasons unknown to us, he appears to have changed his mind and sided with the industry over the protection of children. Indeed, the decision only considered injuries to porn businesses, not to children,” Dines and Levy said Thursday
Over the years the Free Speech Coalition has filed several lawsuits against the law on free speech and illegal search and seizure grounds. Eliminating Section 2257 is a key aim of the porn industry because it affects the business model of the largest corporate distributors of smut, who now regularly source content from low-cost producers around the world, they went onto explain.
“The growth of the market segment featuring young-looking females represented a potential legal threat. And distributors of porn – like other internet companies and social media platforms – want to avoid responsibility for content that could expose them to substantial legal and financial liabilities.”
“The porn industry has emerged as a powerful force that is trying to shape the regulatory environment to support its shifting business model. Compliance with age verification laws might cost the industry some money, but we believe this is a small price to pay to protect children from the predatory porn industry,” they concluded. (source)
All adult content, is required to have a “2257 notice”. This is a legal notice required on every producer of “adult” content to keep records enduring that their “models” are over the age of 18 produced or marketed in the USA and is the informal name for part of the Child Protection and Obscenity Act.
The history of the the 2257 notice began with a woman name Nora Kuzma, a Jewish-American teenage prostitute who using fake documents made twenty of her twenty-one pornographic films using the stage name “Traci Lords” between the ages of 15 and 17. The discovery of her age resulted in a series of prosecutions of the porn industry, jail time for some producers and actors, and a federal government raid on “adult” shops to seize or destroy her videos. The producers of her films defended themselves in court by saying that she provided false documents, which she did, and as a result many were able to avoid charges. In response, the government began drafting a law to ensure that all persons who are involved in the “industry” are over 18. This was the 2257 notice, so that by keeping records, nobody could claim in the future that there was child abuse taking place because there was a paper trail that one could trace and prove the age of the participants.
Removing or eviscerating to the point of irrelevant the 2257 agreement is extremely dangerous because by not being required to maintain records, nobody knows what is being produced with who. The court case, which you can read here, argues that to require the maintenance of records is akin to a “civil rights” no different that that of voter ID requirements or age verification for women seeking to procure an abortion. However, such an argument is absolutely bunk because the only reason NOT to require verification and a record of it, especially in an industry where sexual abuse is rampant, is that one would want to hide abuse from happening.
Consider the Traci Lords’ case. Sure, it is possible that some people honestly believed that she was 22 as she claimed. However, one cannot say that there was not at least one person who did not figure out that she was 15- after all, there is a major difference between a teenager and a woman at the end of college. They knew that she was underage and they hid that fact intentionally- never admitting it to the government, because they knew that it would be a guaranteed prison sentence.
There is already a veritable obsession with “teen” pornography, with some persons making films the day of their 18th birthday. Aside from the fact that such persons were already engaging in sexual activity as legally underage persons, it can be difficult to tell the difference between a 15 year old and an 18 year old women depending on the woman.
Who is to say that papers will not be forged? If they are caught, who is to say the “well I didn’t know they were forged” excuse will not be used again?
This is exactly the reason why it is being done. It is a way of creating a legally ambiguous situation so to justify the same crimes that were being committed three decades ago.
Likewise, this also fits in with a greater trend towards the legalization of child pornography of which their popularity is demonstrated on other Internet forums, such as 4Chan and especially, the /b/ board, known as “random”.
/b/ is one of the most popular boards on 4Chan and in the Internet, as it is used to drive social change through testing, influencing, manipulating, and establishing short and long term trends, with a new forum topic being created every thirty seconds. While child pornography is illegal, /b/ was used for a long time to traffick it by hiding images of children being abused behind pictures of sinks. One can read the history of this on Reddit here, and is the reason why all “sink posting” is banned from 4Chan. Now instead of posting actual images of real abuse, the same persons have resorted to posting the same intentions using detailed anime drawings of children being sexually abused or tortured. These threads are highly popular (one can see the quantity of responses to any threat on the “catalog” page for any board and compare it to other threads on the same board) and at any given time there is at least one of them up.
It should also not be a surprise that on the same /b/ board, there is a tremendous amount of “trap” posting. The phrase “Are Traps gay?” came straight from 4Chan’s anime (/a/) and /b/ boards because of the large number of men posting photos of themselves dressed as women or other men dressed as women and then writing their fantasies about it.
This is not just a case of reposting the same item over and over with little to no response, but rather shows the adaptation of a longer-term trend by a large number of people who continue the thread long after it has been posted and start related threads of their own on similar topics. It is the active normalization in the public mind of child sexual abuse.
This is consistent with the position of Shoebat.com, which is that as the Bible says the LGBT is a heinous sin, it inherently leads to other forms of even worse abuse. The normalization of homosexuality will lead to the normalization of pedophilia, which is what is taking place.
Now that the “Free Speech Coalition,” which if one reads the biographies of the Board of Directors is a front group for all of the major porn companies, has been granted license to not keep records, and given the tremendous amount of young women who are entering pornography not out of desperation but out of a love of vanity, this will result in the usage of underage people being put into adult films. Unlike the past, when there was a greater resistance to the abuse of children, since it is being normalized among the Millennials and Generation Z, there is not going to be the objection to it as before.
In fact, if a court case was brought, it is not impossible to think that any legal “decision” made would be to create a legally lower age of consensus in order to not create an obstacle to abuse, but to lower standards at which point the standards could be lowered again. It is a form of the Hegelian Dialectic, which if you have not read what this is or our analysis of it, click hear to read it, as it is the form of operation by which evil men such as those who wanted this law are able to justify and force themselves on the public.
This is another reason why the Catholic Church’s homosexual abuse scandal, while important, needs to be placed into a larger context, and why it is a form of misdirection to attack the Church, because the same persons who committed crimes against children in the hierarchy are actually reflective of a larger trend taking place in society that nobody wants to address. People will attack the Church over sexual abuse, and yet when the same abuse is put on film with a “producer,” there is silence and cries of “free speech” for a defense. The reality is they simply hate the Church because she is a moral force to expose their sins, and they will find any reason to attack her, including the same sins they so embrace as their own.
In the context of the times, this shows a return to the ways of the ancient world that Christ came into to purge of its evil. As the light of the faith is pushed out, the darkness rushes in to fill it, and the society is embracing the darkness with a profound joy. Just as it was in the days of Rome before Constantine, so it is coming to be again, where the Son on Man will look down and ask if there will be those on the Earth still faithful.
It is a fearful thing to place what is happening now in the context of Revelation, for as God has promised, when the Day of Judgment comes, known in Latin as “day of wrath” (Dies Irae), it will only be man, God, and that good or evil that he has done.
Prepare yourself accordingly.