Lakhota
Diamond Member
This week, Republican delegates are meeting in committee to lay out the 2016 version of their party’s platform document ― a non-binding declaration of #squadgoals that will generate a few days of stories like this one before being largely forgotten. This year’s platform committee has taken dead aim at one of the few successful industries left in America, besides drone warfare and hot takes about Kevin Durant’s free agency decisions. I refer, of course, to pornography.
Yahoo News’ Liz Goodwin reports:
Republican delegates unanimously adopted an amendment to their draft platform Monday morning that called pornography “a public health crisis” and a “public menace” that is destroying lives.
[...]
“Pornography, with his harmful effects, especially on children, has become a public health crisis that is destroying the life of millions. We encourage states to continue to fight this public menace and pledge our commitment to children’s safety and well being,” the amendment stated.
According to Goodwin, the stronger language, identifying porn as a “public health crisis,” was pushed by a North Carolina delegate named Mary Forrester at the behest of the conservative Christian group Concerned Women for America. This quite a step beyond what the 2012 GOP platform document had to say about pornography, which I can quote in its entirety:
We urge active prosecution against child pornography, which is closely linked to the horrors of human trafficking. Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced.
Whether or not pornography can be considered an “insidious epidemic,” as Forrester argues, I’d wager that it hasn’t really been the most pressing concern for most Americans lately ― nor has it made many headlines. Of course, one public health crisis that has made headlines, and that does have a lot of Americans feeling sick and scared and helpless, is gun violence ― especially in the form of mass shootings,which have surged even as overall gun violence has declined.
How do we reconcile the rise in mass shootings with the larger, more encouraging downturn in gun violence? And would it be possible, perhaps, to address mass shootings from a health policy perspective? Might that possibly be an avenue worth exploring if it means we could prevent even one more life from being brutally abbreviated?
That would seem like an area ripe for public health research. Unfortunately, government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are legally barred from doing it, thanks to this thing called the Dickey Amendment.
Back in 1993, research funded by the CDC found its way into the public consciousness in the form of a New England Journal of Medicine article titled “Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home.” As the American Psychological Association’s Christine Jamieson notes, “The study found that keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of homicide.” It also “concluded that rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.”
You’ll never guess what happened next! Unless you’ve already guessed that the National Rifle Association aggressively lobbied to shut down this kind of research, in which case, congratulations.
More: GOP Platform Identifies Pornography As A National Public Health Crisis
Wow, GOP considers pornography a greater “public health crisis" than gun violence. Apparently I've been missing all the riots over pornography.
