Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

According to CNN, conservatives want to ban the naughty videos you can order from hotel entertainment systems. I personally could not care less one way or the other, but the logic employed by Citizens for Community Values bears a brief examination.

As an aside, it should be noted that the name “Citizens for Community Values” does not specify which community is being represented. They’re probably a group of arch-conservatives bent on reverting America to a moral standard that is based on an idea of the 1950s that never existed in the first place, but they could be a nomadic coalition of juggling circus performers, hypothetically. We can’t really be sure from the name, is all I’m saying.

The leader of the CCV claims, “As more and more of these (hardcore) titles become available, we’re going to have sexual abuse cases coming out of the hotels. Hotels are just as dangerous as environments around strip joints and porn stores.” Damning accusations, to be sure.

Of course, Lodgenet, the largest single provider of in-room entertainment services, first started its on-demand video service in 1992, so these videos have been available for at least fourteen years. If there’s supposed to be a torrent of sexual abuse cases stemming from the availability of this material in hotels, it should be happening by now. Yet instances of rape and sexual assault have actually fallen by 64% since 1993. You know what? I’m going to follow the CCV’s model here and just infer causation, especially since I have research to back up my claims. Hotel porno may, in fact, make the world better.

As far as the claim that these on-demand videos make hotels as dangerous as strip clubs and sex shops, the danger in these areas has much more to do with poverty, neglect by law enforcement, and drug use than whether you can conveniently purchase Slippery When Wet from the shop on the corner.

The CCV’s About page claims, “The elimination of pornography and obscenity in much of the public marketplace has begun to break the cycle of sexual exploitation and victimization in our community.” Except that it hasn’t. Sexual exploitation has decreased almost entirely because of better education and increased public awareness of the factors that can lead to sexual abuse, as well as how to report and cope with it when it happens. The elimination of pornography a) certainly has not occurred, especially given the rise of the Internet and b) while exposure to pornography has been shown to desensitize viewers to sexual violence, it’s a preliminary finding at best.

Since the CCV “exists to promote Judeo-Christian moral values,” maybe they should work harder on loving others and working to decrease poverty, substance abuse, and violence in the community, all of which are factors in rape (note the absence of pornography from that list in the CDC link). The whole crusade against this material represents a laughably myopic sense of priority on the part of conservatives.