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Men & Women | Parents | Pastors, Leaders, Teachers | Teens |
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| Why WholeHearrted |
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WholeHearted is a special new project of the Pittsburgh Coalition Against Pornography. We have undertaken this project as the first step towards a radical change in our mission and focus of activism. The mission of WholeHearted is to cultivate a new sexual revolution that builds a passionate and responsible sexual culture by promoting and modeling timeless sexual values. Why are we changing our mission and focus? Because the fight against pornography has changed. It began in the 1960's as a campaign for the sound interpretation of our Constitution, namely preserving the right of citizens to declare some forms of pornography obscene and therefore illegal. (Unbeknownst to most Americans, obscenity has never enjoyed first amendment protection.) Then, we had the majority (albeit the "silent majority") of Americans on our side. Through the 70's and into the 1980's we won many key legal battles preserving the right of communities to declare certain materials and performances "obscene"; and to zone and license sexually oriented businesses. Even recently, in 2001, we won another Supreme Court battle for the right of communities to ban nude dancing in a case from Erie PA. However, since the late 1980's we have been losing the battle for public opinion. (The exception, thankfully, is child pornography.) The enforcement of our obscenity laws is dependent on the legal phrase "according to contemporary community standards" to define what is obscene. Well, you can guess that with the state of television, movies and the Internet today that our "contemporary community standards" are extremely tolerant. There has not been a meaningful prosecution, anywhere in the country, of hard-core pornography in over ten years. Without "contemporary community standards" of public condemnation and shame for pornography, law enforcement efforts are severely hampered. We have learned that we cannot win this war through law enforcement efforts alone. Thus, the war against pornography has primarily become a war of ideas. We must recapture the "contemporary community standards" that do not tolerate pornography. Unfortunately, pornography by its very nature communicates ideas and value systems wrapped in a package that is hard to resist. Our movement has largely failed to fight back with a winsome value system that rejects pornography. We at WholeHearted believe that we can build a passionate and responsible sexual culture by promoting and modeling timeless sexual values. Although we can never equal the firepower of pornography to sell its values in the marketplace of ideas, we must not fail to market our values and give people sound reasons to reject pornography. Pornography has changed as well. The pornography revolution began around the turn of the century with French postcards that depicted Rubenesque women in their underwear. Black market pornography flourished during the 40's and 50's, but it was Hugh Hefner's "Playboy" that created a middle-America marketing breakthrough with his semi-nude centerfold pin-up's wrapped in the legitimizing package of a men's magazine -- "I read it for the articles". A series of liberal court decisions combined with a seriously flawed "Presidential Study of Pornography" opened the door to the marketing of hard-core pornography during the 60's and 70's. In the mid 70's the X-rated movie, "Deep Throat", produced and distributed by the Columbo organized crime family, legitimized hard core porn to the average American and demonstrated the immense profit potential of this semi-legal entertainment medium. During this era the primary distribution system for soft and hard core pornography was the seedy, inner city adult bookstore and adult theater. Then came cable porn, videos and dial-a-porn in the mid 80's. The pornography industry grew in proportion to the privacy offered by these technological advances in distribution. Finally, the ultimate private delivery system of hard-core pornography developed in the 1990's -- the Internet. Today the same vile hard core pornography that was once relegated to dirty, but public, adult bookstores is available in the privacy of our homes. Due to the unregulated and international nature of the Internet, even child pornography and violent pornography have become easily available to anyone with a computer modem. And the United States of America leads the world in the number of households, over 70%, connected to the Internet. Mainstream entertainment has also been polluted by the values of the pornography revolution. In 1986, during the midst of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, our movement was in a heated internal debate about whether to focus our efforts on hard-core pornography, or broaden our work to include the decline of mainstream entertainment. Then, some felt that our focus should include the barrage of sexual innuendo from the likes of "Three's Company" -- and others felt that kind of entertainment was a peripheral issue. The 2001 season premier of "Ally McBeal", featured the lead character, a thirty something lawyer, having sex with a stranger in a car wash. Even retailers have jumped on the bandwagon. Abercrombie and Fitch clothiers produce a quarterly catalogue that features pictures of semi-nude college students and sexual advice columns in an effort to sell more clothes. That debate is over. Mainstream entertainment and marketing is full of soft-core porn heading to hard core -- and now our activism must focus on the entire range of the entertainment culture. What will it take to turn our society away from pornography? To change our society we believe that our movement must address the basic reasons for the demand of pornography itself. We must ask, "why does the market exist?" and "what can we do to lessen the demand for it?" (For answers to these questions read our article, "Why Do Americans Accept Pornography?") That is why the mission of WholeHearted is to cultivate a healthy sexual revolution that reclaims human dignity and responsible values. We must encourage our culture to adopt a value system that rejects pornography because it knows and loves healthy sexuality. For WholeHearted to accomplish this mission we must undertake an extensive education and public relations campaign. We have started a 4 to 6 part seminar series for churches. Four churches have done the series and they have given us very good reviews. We are testing new public relations messages with focus groups. Our goal is to produce an inexpensive guerilla marketing campaign, built around our WholeHearted.org website. WholeHearted is not superseding the original mission of the Pittsburgh Coalition Against Pornography to press for obscenity law enforcement and to encourage the passage of new local, state and federal laws. We are still helping local municipalities pass and defend zoning and licensing laws. We will always help organize communities to close outlets for pornography and obscene entertainment. What we are now endeavoring to do is to fight a two front war! With God's help we hope to make a sea change in the demand for pornography while we continue to attack the supply of this soul destroying material. Dorn Checkley, Director WholeHearted. |