People have been wondering for years how to get porn out of their communities. Now they know: Make bathrooms gender-specific! That’s all it took in North Carolina, where one of the country’s leading adult sites is hitting the road to protest H.B. 2. A day after Bruce Springsteen’s tirade, xHamster is the latest liberal to jump on the bandwagon out of town. Like PayPal, the site is livid that Governor Pat McCrory (R-N.C.) is giving local businesses the freedom to set their own policies. (Also known as the free market.) “Sorry, bigots!” they tweeted. “As of today, access to xHamster.com is blacked out in the state of North Carolina until further notice… Judging by the stats of what you North Carolinians watch, we feel this punishment is a severe one. We will not stand by and pump revenue into a system that promotes this type of garbage. We respect all sexualities and embrace them.”

That sound you hear is the cheering of concerned parents and pastors, who know the devastation porn brings to families and communities. If anything, xHamster is doing North Carolina a huge favor! Stacks of new research — secular and otherwise — is warning that pornography may be the greatest public health crisis no one knows about. The Washington Post sounded the alarm earlier this week on the heels of a sobering Time magazine cover story about the young men who are starting to fight the industry that devastated their relationships. “Is porn immoral?” expert Gail Dines asks. “That doesn’t matter: It’s a public health crisis.” After a two-decade deluge of easily accessible images and videos, Time explains, “some of the most strident alarms are coming from the same demographic as its most enthusiastic customers.”

Sexual dysfunction, aggression, exploitation, and even the broader evils of prostitution and human trafficking have their roots in the filth of xHamster and others. “Scholars can say with confidence that porn is an industrial product that shapes how we think about gender, sexuality, relationships, intimacy, sexual violence, and gender equality,” Dines points out, “for the worse.” Believe it or not, porn sites get “more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined.” Some of the more startling results of that consumption are in the new studies of college men. “Researchers found that 83 percent reported seeing mainstream pornography, and that those who did were more likely to say they would commit rape or sexual assault if they knew they wouldn’t get caught.” It’s the number one cause of child sex trafficking in America.

And if you think the church is immune, think again. According to a startling new survey from Barna Group and Josh McDowell, 64 percent of Christian men say they’ve viewed pornography at least once this month. In the pulpit, the struggle is just as real: 57 percent of pastors and 64 percent of youth pastors admit they’ve used porn, “either currently or in the past.” “Probably one of the biggest [groups] suffering today as victims are the wives of the men addicted to pornography sitting right next to them in the pews,” Josh told me last week on “Washington Watch.” (Full interview below.) And although most Americans believe porn is “bad for society,” those attitudes are quickly shifting toward neutrality or “good for society” in younger generations. (Believe it or not, a majority of teens think not recycling is more immoral than pornography!) Even more shocking: only one out of 20 young people have a friend who will say pornography is bad.

Nothing erodes a person’s faith faster than internet pornography — and because of the internet, pornography is everywhere. “It’s accessible, it’s affordable, and it’s anonymous,” Josh lamented. And its effects? Astounding. “Just as the tobacco industry argued for decades that there was no proof of a connection between smoking and lung cancer, so too, has the porn industry, with the help of a well-oiled public relations machine, denied the existence of empirical research on the impact of its products.” Nothing could help North Carolina more than flushing out an industry that shatters marriages and families. Of course, it’s a sad indictment of our culture that websites like xHamster think they have a viable seat in the business community to begin with. But in the end, the only people affected by the site’s exit are the perverted people who would have used Charlotte’s ordinance to take advantage of others. If I were a state leader, I’d ask XHamster’s competition to join the boycott of North Carolina. Based on the turnout at [Monday’s] pro-H.B. 2 rally, they won’t exactly be missed!

Originally published here.

With Kasich, It’s Hit-on-Miss.

Governor John Kasich (R-Ohio) must have graduated from the Nancy Pelosi School of Public Policy: you have to bash the bill to find out what’s in it. That’s what the GOP candidate (who hasn’t won a single delegate since March 15) says to a Mississippi law he hasn’t even bothered to read. Desperately clawing to stay relevant in a race that’s left him behind, Kasich proved why he wouldn’t even be an acceptable VP choice in [Monday] night’s CNN town hall meeting. After telling CBS over the weekend that he’d have forced businesses to do the government’s bidding on bathrooms, the governor dug a bigger hole Monday by sounding like an Obama surrogate on religious liberty.

“I read about this thing they did in Mississippi,” he said, “where apparently you can deny somebody service because they’re gay?” Kasich said. “What the hell are we doing in this country? I mean, look, I may not appreciate a certain lifestyle or even approve of it, but I can — it doesn’t mean I’ve got to go write a law and try to figure out how to have another wedge issue.” Kasich didn’t read it. He read about it. Big difference. As president, I hope he’d do more than take someone else’s word for what a measure as important as Mississippi’s. If Kasich had bothered to look at the bill, he’d know that nothing in H.B. 757 gives anyone — Christians or otherwise — the right to deny services to other people. What it does do is ensure that men and women of faith aren’t punished, fined, suspended, or turned down for government contracts (as dozens have been) for their views on marriage.

What Kasich fails to grasp is that Mississippi’s bill doesn’t create a wedge issue — it helps solve one. A man who’s answer to the clash of freedoms was “Everybody, chill out,” should appreciate that. Under this law, businesses and same-sex couples have the same freedom to live and work according to their own beliefs. But the Ohio Governor, who sounds more like President Obama by the day, insists, “We had a Supreme Court ruling — and you know what, let’s move on.” In other words, move on from your beliefs, from the ancient tenets of your faith. Would he say the same about abortion? Roe v. Wade decided the issue in 1973, so let’s move on? Or the Second Amendment? If eight unelected justices are America’s final moral authority, why bother with policy platforms at all?

“Frankly, if I’m selling cupcakes, why don’t I just sell a cupcake? That’s what I do in commerce,” he argued. “It gets to be a tricky thing about how much you involve somebody against some deeply-held belief. But most of the time, I think we can accommodate one another, don’t you?” Mississippi agreed. That’s what the whole law is about: accommodation. The only reason liberals don’t like it is because it isn’t one-sided accommodation.

Meanwhile, if you want to hear a thoughtful response from someone who cared enough to study the issue, check out Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) response to whether he would sign a measure similar to Governor Phil Bryant’s (R-Miss.) on a national scale. “… You asked about a federal bill. I actually don’t have to wonder about that hypothetically. A federal bill did come up and was passed in the 1990s. It was called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It passed the United States Senate virtually unanimously, virtually every Democrat and virtually every Republican voting for it. It was signed into law [by] a Democrat, Bill Clinton. This used to be noncontroversial. Unfortunately, however, in today’s modern Democratic Party, it has become so radicalized and extreme that today’s Democratic Party has decided supporting religious liberty is inconsistent with their partisan objectives.”

Originally published here.

‘Restoring All Things’

How can Christians tell our story in a culture that is increasingly hostile toward our message? Yesterday at FRC, Warren Cole Smith answered that question in an FRC lecture concerning his new book, Restoring All Things: God’s Audacious Plan to Change the World through Everyday People. Co-authored with another longtime friend of FRC, the Colson Center’s John Stonestreet, the book “cuts through the chaos and uncertainty to show you how God is powerfully active and intensely engaged in fulfilling His promise to restore all things. Through inspiring real-life stories of justice, mercy, love, and forgiveness in our communities and neighborhoods, you’ll encounter a God who is intimately involved in His creation and using His church to work out the redemption of this world.‘

Warren offered four summary ideas for how believers can penetrate the social fog of our time, one that obscures the wonderful work Christ is doing in and through His people on behalf of a world so in need of His redemptive love and transformation.

He concluded with the story of the "plague of Cyprian,” a virulent disease that swept through the Roman Empire from 250-270 AD. Although Christians were blamed for the plague, they ministered — often at the cost of their lives – to those dying from it. This caught the attention of the pagan society and led to the emergence of what had been a marginalized and often persecuted faith to being the dominant faith of the Empire itself. So, as Warren admonished, Christians need to run to the plagues of our time to bring the good news about Jesus to a hurting world.

Christianity in action is the most powerful force on the planet. Watch Warren’s compelling lecture and learn how you can bring this restorative message to those all around you.

Originally published here.