Dayton Moore cares about putting a winning Kansas City Royals team on the field. But first, he wants to make sure they’re a healthy group off it. Like a number of general managers, Moore is a Christian. And, as his players will tell you, his second biggest priority is for players to have victory in every area of their lives. That starts, he told the team, by taking a stand against toxic influences like pornography.

To some sports writers, the team’s seminar on porn was way out of left field. CBS writer Mike Axisa all but mocked the session, saying the topic belonged in high school, not with a group of grown men. But maybe that’s the problem. Adults haven’t been talking about porn — not to each other, and certainly not to their children, who are encountering these images in ways their parents never imagined. After all the sexualization and victimization taking place in our culture today, isn’t it time someone stepped up to the plate?

Fight the New Drug thinks so. It’s the group the Royals invited to talk to players, coaches, equipment managers, and trainers about just how deadly pornography can be — to relationships, children’s innocence, and the thousands of women lured into an industry that exploits, demeans, and ensnares them. If you want to know how out of control this crisis is becoming, brace yourself for this New York Times feature, “What Teenagers Are Learning from Online Porn” (Warning: extremely graphic content.) It’s a difficult piece to get through, but an important one. The pages and pages of conversations about what kids think is normal would shock and sober anyone. If the explicit descriptions bother you, just know that these are the same things our teenagers are confronting every day — usually without any idea of how to handle them. Maggie Jones writes, almost wistfully:

Looking back over the last several years of middle and high school, A., who asked me to identify her by the first initial of her middle name, said she wished she had had someplace — home, school, a community sex-ed program — to learn about sex. Instead, she learned about it from porn. She saw it for the first time by accident, after a group of sixth-grade boys cajoled her to look at [a website], which she didn’t know was a porn site. She was fascinated.

A few years later, she searched online for porn again after listening to girls in the high school locker room talk… A.‘s parents, whom she describes as conservative about sex, hadn’t talked to her about female anatomy or sex, and her school didn’t offer any sex education before ninth grade… Porn served as her study guide when she was 16 and was the first among her friends to have sex. She clicked through videos to watch women…

The boys’ stories are even more disturbing. They talk about aggressively hurting, choking, and punishing women as if it’s routine. “Women in porn like it,” one said. So, they assume all women do. They don’t realize that these are actors who are being exploited for an industry that’s tied to the dark world of trafficking, domestic violence, child abuse, and abortion. They don’t realize that this is a sinister trade that’s teaching men to dehumanize women, leading spouses to stray from marriages, and killing love and intimacy the world over. And unfortunately for our children, who have access to the Internet as early as eight or 10, the dangers are only a smartphone away.

“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 … denied the existence of empirical research on the impact of its products,” Gail Dines wrote for The Washington Post. That fact has led plenty of states, including Arkansas, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia, Maryland, to fight back, declaring pornography a public health hazard. Utah Gov. Herbert (R) can’t believe anyone would be indifferent. “If a library or a McDonald’s or anyone else was giving out cigarettes to our children, we would be picketing them. And, yet, our children are accessing pornography on their tablets on these sites and we seem to be okay with that.”

At a time when women are trying to reassert themselves through movements like #MeToo, pornography should be their common enemy. Ross Douthat, who was profoundly affected by Jones’s New York Times piece, wrote a response called “Let’s Ban Porn.” In it, he talks about how this debate should go hand in hand with the current cause célèbre.

We are supposed to be in the midst of a great sexual reassessment, a clearing-out of assumptions that serve misogyny and impose bad sex on semi-willing women. And such a reassessment will be incomplete if it never reconsiders our surrender to the idea that many teenagers, most young men especially, will get their sex education from online smut… [I]f you want better men by any standard, there is every reason to regard ubiquitous pornography as an obstacle — and to suspect that between virtual reality and creepy forms of customization, its influence is only likely to get worse.

This is no longer someone else’s problem. It affects our playgrounds, our politics, even our pulpits. Fifty-seven percent of pastors and 64 percent of youth pastors admitted to the Barna Group that they’ve used porn “either currently or in the past.” The devastation to marriages and families and teenagers is real. If we want to do something about it, then parents have to be willing to take on this awkward and sometimes uncomfortable subject with their kids. Wives and husbands, pastors and congregations, legislators and voters — and yes, even major sports leagues — need to be committed enough to ending this crisis to sit down and talk. If you don’t know what to say, start here or here or here. Just start somewhere.

Originally published here.

A Minors’ Setback for Freedom

What kind of country refuses to give people the help they need? In some states, ours. When it comes to therapy, no topic is more controversial than whether counselors should be able to help patients who want to overcome their same-sex attractions. Until recently, there had never been — in all of history — a form of talk therapy that was outlawed because of what the client hoped to achieve. But unfortunately, that’s all changed. And more states than ever are threatening to try.

In Maryland, FRC’s own Mary Beth Waddell was one of just two witnesses trying to keep freedom alive in the world of counseling. The bill’s proponents who are doing everything they can to outlaw this form of therapy harped on the supposed dangers of working through these issues with teenagers. That’s ridiculous, since, as Peter Sprigg points out, even the liberal American Psychological Association recognizes that “there are people who perceive that they have benefited from” SOCE (or, sexual orientation change efforts). In other words, the LGBT lobby and other far-left groups are only fighting this battle out of ideological bias and the misguided (and unproven notion) that people are “born gay.”

As a matter of fact, Peter points out in a great paper that explains this topic in depth, it’s precisely because people are not born gay that patients have benefited from this kind of therapy. “There are many psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors and therapists who have reported success in treating clients for unwanted same-sex attractions. Much of this research and clinical experience has been reported in the peer-reviewed scholarly literature for decades.” Nicholas A. Cummings was chief psychologist for Kaiser Permanente for 20 years and served a term as president of the American Psychological Association. Cummings is not a social conservative who opposes homosexuality. He wrote in USA Today in 2013, “Gays and lesbians have the right to be affirmed in their homosexuality.” But even he conceded that “contending that all same-sex attraction is immutable is a distortion of reality.” During his years of practice, Cummings wrote, “Of the patients I oversaw who sought to change their orientation, hundreds were successful.”

Obviously, efforts like Maryland’s are just another attempt to silence the truth that people can change, and that there is — as many have found — freedom from this destructive lifestyle. Mary Beth pointed out another important fact, which is that measures like SB 1028 pose another threat — to the principles of the counseling profession and the First Amendment guarantee of free speech and free exercise. “The legal principle,” she explained, “is that the state has no right or power to even inquire into — let alone interfere with or punish — the verbal communication that takes place within certain special relationships. Those include the relationship of attorney and client, of priest and confessor, or of doctor and patient — as well as within the relationship of therapist and client.”

During the question portion of her testimony, liberals brought up the issue of coercion. They’re worried, she was told, about minors whose parents are forcing them into therapy they don’t want. But, as Mary Beth explained, parents, children, and therapists would all play an important role in deciding that. After all, no decent counselor is going to subject someone to therapy they don’t want.

One of the more powerful moments of the hearing was when a man who identified as a female spoke out in opposition. Although he hadn’t gone through the therapy to reorient, he, more than anyone, understands the need for a safe place to talk openly about his feelings. Let’s hope Maryland was listening. True compassion is giving people the help they need — not trapping them in a life of struggle and pain.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.