Porn Industry Stoops to New Low
By James L. Lambert
February 28, 2006
(AgapePress) – In what is further evidence of the porn industry’s disdain of Christianity, an Internet-based sex toy company has begun selling items modeled after religious icons.
Web-based Divine Productions goes out of its way to promote products that clearly offend and mock Christianity and the Catholic Church. Through its website, the company is offering sex toys [named after Christian icons].
Gene McConnell is director of Authentic Relationships International, an organization that reaches out to men and women who are struggling with addiction to pornography. “It is clear that [porn] providers like this have to expose their customers to more destructive ideas to get their customers to come back for more,” he says.
The distributor sells its products by using religious imagery and terminology to make fun of biblical characters, among them Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Judas, and Moses. Company advertising employs slogans such as: “Let Judas make a martyr out of you”; “help Moses part the —- sea”; or “find out what it means to be truly touched by God” by using “God’s immaculate — .”
McConnell believes Divine Productions “is using sex to communicate hate to the religious community.”
Nationally, the handful of organizations that regularly battle the porn industry and its message of obscenity — groups like Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, American Family Association, National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families, Alliance Defense Fund, and Citizens for Community Values — are, for the most part, religious-based or have close ties to the Christian faith community. Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University and senior pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church (Lynchburg, VA) — and a friend to many of the leaders of these groups — says ridicule of the Church “is something that has happened since the time of Christ.”
“When our beliefs are ridiculed,” says Falwell, “Christians are admonished in the Bible to pray for our enemies instead of burning building and killing people.” The well-known evangelist was referring to the worldwide protests by Muslim extremists over the comic character of Mohammed in a Denmark newspaper.
Syndicated radio talk-show host Paul McGuire says “it is amazing to the me that major media groups do not see this as a frontal assault on Christianity.” And like Falwell, the Crawford Broadcasting host does not suggest any type of retaliation by believers. “However bad as it is, as Christians our response should be one of love [to these pornographers] — and also one of forgiveness.”