PORNOGRAPHY

Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

—Jude 7

4507 Startling Facts

Over 19 million sex magazines are sold in the United States every week. Peepshow emporiums in midtown Manhattan bring in an estimated $5 million a year.

When the courts liberalized what could be put on sale, the market for salacious magazines skyrocketed. One man and his wife started publishing a filthy magazine on an investment of $350.00 and in the first year they made $650,000.00.

Time magazine reports, “The market for erotic books, film and paraphernalia, which are sold mostly to the middle-classed and the middle-aged, has increased by an estimated 300% in the past five years. Police experts figure that the annual sales of pornography are about $500 million, and some put to a total as high as $2 billion.”

—Homer Duncan

4508 More Startling Facts

Artists at a New York exhibition displayed their “worst work,” in order to question the basis of taste in Western culture. One pornographic poem was covered with a paper curtain that said, “Look at your own risk.”

In Europe a fifty-five-minute documentary on the German Richard Strauss showed the composer’s wife being raped and murdered; a horde of sex-mad nuns attacking the hero. After protests had been rejected, the author said: “Thank God there is still such a thing as free expression.”

At this year’s Monte Carlo TV festival, one entry was “Funeral Games,” a play in which a bogus priest seduces penitent ladies, steals from the offering box, and is accused of murder and adultery.

In California the erotic revue Oh! Calcutta!, featuring simulated lovemaking in the nude, was raided by police, and several actors were arrested. Undeterred, author Kenneth Tynan is said to have promised the show would be “more perverse and decadent.”

—Christianity Today

4509 Notifying The Post Office

Acting under a new law, 500,000 citizens formally notified the U. S. Postal Service in Washington, D. C., that they don’t want to receive “sexually-oriented” material in the mails. Any dealer mailing obscene material to people so registered can be imprisoned for five years or fined $5,000, or both. There has never been such a strong favorable reaction from the public, postal officials said.

“For half a milion people in less than a year to go to the trouble of completing the form and sending it in is an indication that this material is bothering and concerning many families,” said Assistant Postmaster General Williams Cotter, head of the Postal Inspection Service.

—Pastor’s Manual

4510 Reusable Mailing List

Carol Trauth, a college senior and national youth director of Citizens for Decent Literature, spoke before the U. S. House Post Office and Civil Service Committee.

She said, “Never in history has there been available to the libertiness such a means of disseminating their philosophy of moral corruption and decadence. Practically every magazine has advertisements from which I can order explicit instruction in sexual activity, much of which is deviate, and almost all of which is illicit.

“Answering any advertisement places my name on a list which sooner or later will be sold to a filth peddler who, in turn, will mail me material which is wanton and depraved, capable of poisoning my mind at any age. The pornography trade takes over ¼ billion a year from the gullible public.”

4511 A Different Message Transmitted

Illustrative of the change and decay in the world around us is the difference of emphasis between the first telegraph message sent by Samuel Morse and the first still picture transmitted by satellites.

“The first telegraph message sent by Inventor Samuel Morse over a 40-mile line between Washington and Baltimore was “What hath God wrought!” [In March] the first still picture ever transmitted via two satellites, Lani Bird II and Early Bird, was sent more than 7,000 miles between Honolulu and London.” The picture? Swedish Crown Prince Carl Gustaf together with a coed in a bikini on the beach at Waikiki.

4512 Right To Take Pictures

A judge in Montreal, Canada, turned down an appeal by a hairdresser for an injunction against the showing of the rock-music movie “Woodstock.” Without his consent, the hairdresser was filmed in the nude with his girlfriend. He claimed the film was an invasion of his privacy.

The judge refused to grant his plea, ruling that it was legal to photograph a person in public without his consent. If the man didn’t want his actions known and shown, he simply should not have engaged in them.

—Stanley C. Baldwin

4513 Orgasmic Rock

A recent article in Time magazine, occuring on the show business and TV page, describes what is called Orgasmic Rock. These moral perverts seem to be proud in saying—”this is music to commit adultery with.” This is rottenness and corruption. Disc-hungry teenagers are buying the filthy records. Radio stations are playing them on the air. America is sinking into the cesspool of iniquity.

—Christian Victory

See also: Moral Laxity .