PORN-AGAIN THROUGH THE LOVE OF THE REDEEMER

The other day, a compadre and I were having a delightful discussion about what we, individually, could do to help cure cancer; comparing how many hours in a week we volunteer at children's hospitals; and which grandmother of ours is our favorite, when quite unexpectantly our topic of converstaion took a turn for the lively and we found ourselves debating the merits of pornography. Since he believes himself to be some sort of connoiseur of adult entertainment, he spent the better part of a half hour asking me questions, lecturing me, and in general providing the sort of advice an unemployed and felonious uncle might espouse to his fourteen-year old nephew. My own personal opinion of pornography is that it is there and I'm not oppossed to it, per se, but I don't have any particular urge to rush out and purchase my very own DVD of Cum-Wranglers of Wyoming Ride the Black Cowboys of the Congo or something. Now, at the other end of the spectrum, I am not like another friend of mine whose ego is too fragile to mention by name in this public forum but who, for various reasons best diagnosed by a professional and not myself, refuses to own any kind of pornography because he is afraid his mother may find it. The man, it should be mentioned, lives thousands of miles away from his mother and is 27 years old.

I fall somewhere in between these two; I wouldn't mind having some porno but I'm not going to go out and purchase some. Besides, that's what two minute clips on the internet is for. Why do I need a two-hour tape of the Amway lady shagging some greasy, bare-chested man in an apartment in Miami? Of course, it goes without saying that I'm a stallion and will do whatever it takes (and for however long) to please a lady when the occasion presents itself, but in the comfort of my own home and in the lonely hours where such self-love occurs, I prefer impersonating the hare over the turtle. Give me "Luna" from BTRA and a minute and a half, and bingo-bango, it's Bedtime for Bonzo.

As our conversation continued, Mr. Bender spoke, rather reverently, of the positive effect pornography has had on his life. He followed his rousing soliloquy with an offer to send me some of his out-dated and used pornography. Not that I'm one to decline kind offers and gifts, but second-hand pornography does seem a bit dirty to me. Does that make me overly prudish? I just can't help but imagine opening the case and trying to insert the tape with a pair of oven mitts and fresh wipes, and somehow that's just not "hot" to me. But if there's one thing I'm not, it's ungrateful, and I look forward to receiving the tapes soon.

Logic and reason would have left that conversation as a relic, but there is something in this crazy world called "serendipity" which every so often rears its head and lays in your lap an egg of coincidence. And that was an analogy that made no sense. What I mean to say is that later that evening while watching "The Situation with Tucker Carlson", as is my wont, I witnessed the interview of a woman named Heather Beach, a reformed porn actress who has opted to start spreading the Good Word instead of her legs. Her Christian ministry, called JC, Girls, Girls, Girls, (which, I imagine, would look good in neon), reaches out to women working in pornography and asks them to develop a relationship with God, the Father (which it must be re-iterated to them is not similar to developing a relationship with their own father, as most porn stars have no relationship with their biological fathers besides an occasional sexual molestation).

Now, some of you are aware that I am quite good friends with an old codger from a small, seedy little town in Indiana named Billy Sumday. He's getting up in years but still has a magic light to him and a fire for spreading the word of the Good Lord. I called him up the other night and asked him what he thought of all this. He told me he'd think about and get back to me, and boy has he. The below is reprinted with his permission and is a sermon that the good Reverend Sumday will be preaching to the devoted at The Third Baptist Church of Reformed Methodists of Packerton this coming Sunday.

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"Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."--Gal. 6:7.

I know of no more suitable text in all the Bible for the subject that I have in hand. And by the presence of such a vast audience and by the expectant look upon your upturned faces I am sure that you will not expect me to utter one word of defense on the proposition that amusement and titillation is good for your soul or any other bodily part.

If I'm confusing you, then just stick with me cause what I tend to do is muddy things up at first and then bring all of it around into the clear at the end like a giant Godly jigsaw puzzle.

Here is one of two alternatives to the problem of debauchery. He can consume his energy and time in talking about the minor usages of the possible limits one might go, or he can peel the bark away and show the thing full of wormholes and run the risk of losing his fair reputation. I want to say I have willfully and deliberately, and with malice afterthought, chosen the latter course. My words may be strong, and if they are you must remember they are blood-red with conviction. With the cry of lost souls ringing in my ears, I cannot remain still. I must cry out.

We always associate in our minds certain amusements--the theater, the cards, jeans-wearing, the dance, and hard-core pornography. While some will justify one, others will condemn it. Some who play cards will seek to justify that and condemn the theater; and those who go to the theater may condemn the hard-core pornography. In my opinion, jeans-wearing is of such doubtful character that it has been relegated to the same class of forbidden amusements as the theater.

Now it's been brought to my attention by a good friend that there are now churches in Los Angeles, California that cater to none but the sex-addicted and pleasure-craving empty souls of the pornography business. Have you ever heard such a contradictory thing? He might as well have told me that horses are best for burgers and cows for riding the range.

I want it distinctly understood that my scrap is not with the theater or jeans-wearing as an institution but rather the intention behind it. However, I do fight the hard-core pornography as an institution, and am against it with both hammer and tongs; I am against the rot and filth and rubbish and trash that are spewed out onto the stage and over the camera-lens.

I had a narrow escape once from going on the stage myself. Old Tom Keene, the great cocksmith, asked me once to go out on the road as his understudy. "You would make a hell of a crackerjack, Billy," he said to me. Tom was a good scout, but I am a preacher, not an actor nor a wielder of the fleshy sword.

An actress whose name I will not give said this: "After years on the stage I am convinced that the pornography business is the most corrupt in the world." Now, she was a dim bulb, there. But it is true that upon the charred souls of women most of the men who are a power in the pornography world have climbed to their height, and most of them wear jeans to boot.

You sow bridge whist and auction pitch and five hundred in the home and you reap a crop of gamblers. You sow the dance and the ballroom and you reap a crop of brothels. You sow saloons and you reap a harvest of drunkards.

You must want a lot of prostitutes or you wouldn't sow dances; you must want a lot of vomiting, puking drunkards or you wouldn't sow saloons, and you must want a bunch of gamblers or you wouldn't play cards in your homes.

I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.

If you have any cards in your home, you had better throw them in the furnace when you get back there or else throw your Bibles in the furnace. The two won't mix. Oh, you need not gasp! I am handing it to you straight! There is no use having Bibles around your house if you are going to make a joke of His Word by playing bridge.

And the same goes for making your own pornographic videos and handing them out to friends!

Somebody will say I'm sure: "What is the matter with that preacher? Doesn't he believe in amusements?"

There is not a man from Omaha to Topeka to Packerton who believes more in amusements than I do. But I believe that they should be recreative and harmless. Nobody believes more in amusements than I.

What games do I play? Well, I play baseball and lawn tennis, although I think that that is a girl's game and I don't like it- -and I play golf and checkers and chess. Somebody says: "What is the difference between a game of cards and a game of checkers?" Well, just as much difference as there is between Heaven and Hell. Did you ever think of that, you ignoramous! Ever since the day that cards were invented to satisfy the whims of an idiotic king they have been the tools of the gambler.

Now, I am not trying to cram anything down your throats. I am appealing to your sense of reason and decency, and if you are not man or woman enough to listen, I guess God Almighty doesn't need you. Somebody says to me: "Mr. Sumday, are you going to include the square dance?" They all look alike to me, even the Macarena. It does not take very long to cut the corners off. There was a time in America when the stately cotillion seemed to satisfy America, but it is too slow for the hot blood of the twenty-first century. They must have something that will chase hurdles through their veins.

If there were nothing but card players and dancers and pornographers and jeans-wearers in the church, it would stink and rot out. The lowest-down rascal in any community is a dancing Methodist. You say: "Mr. Sumday, the church is too strict with us." Who can charge the church with being too strict with its young people? The bars are so low now that any old hog can come and root and crawl in. Any old lobster with two or three suits of clothes and a bank account can break into most any church.

The dancing Christian never was a soul winner. The dance is simply a hugging match set to music. The dance is a sexual love feast. And that's a metaphor. Pornography, on the other hand, actually is a sexual love feast.

But the question, sinners, is where does the line stop for one and start for another? Hell if you know is the answer so keep your trouser-pants on and listen to a man who knows the heart of God.

I say that it is unspiritual. Many a pastor is heartbroken and is sighing for new fields because of the godless mob in the church. I had rather have twelve women filled with the Holy Ghost than a hundred theater-gadders, wine-guzzlers, jeans-wearers, frivolous dancers, and big-bootied sex slaves. What under God's Heaven do you amount to? The church is honeycombed with the rottenness of society.

Say, if God Almighty gives you a rap on the back of the head and shakes a shroud over your old carcass, and telephones for the undertaker to come and measure you for your coffin, you will begin to whine and sniffle and cry to God, like a sick cat.

Girls! Listen! It is immoral. Are you deaf in that head of yours or just a pack of imbeciles?

My wife and I have been at the bedside of a girl who was dying in a house of ill fame. She said the reason of her downfall had been the dance, which she began when fifteen years old. She used to attend Sunday School. When we asked her if she had any message for the girls, she cried, "Tell the girls and warn them to let the dance alone."

Do you know that three-fourths of all the girls who are ruined owe their downfall to that very thing. You let a young man whose character would make a black mark on a piece of tar paper, who goes down the line every other night, hug and dance with your daughter, and see what happens. They are dancing the tango, the rottenest, most putrid, stinkingest dance that ever wriggled out of the pot of perdition- -that's what the tango is. And then they go home and hump all night and video tape it on a camera-box.

You are too low-down for me.

When I danced on the puncheon floor in the log cabin on the frontier in Iowa, we used to be able to get a stick of wood between them, but now you can't get a piece of tissue paper between. We're going some nowadays. I can understand why some of the young people want to dance, but what some of you old fellows, who have to grease your joints before going on the floor, see in it, I don't know.

I have more respect for a saloon-keeper than for a dancing teacher. I don't believe the saloons will do as much to damn the morals of young people as the dancing school. That is my position. I don't care anything about yours. Professor Faulkner said that he knew of one private dancing school that sent six girls into houses of ill fame in about three months. He talked with 200 girls and found that 165 fell as the result of the dance, twenty by drink, ten by choice and five from poverty.

Listen. I want you to hear what I've got to say. They tried the municipal dance hall out in Cleveland and it was so rotten that the sheriff finally insisted that it be closed. Don't talk that municipal dance hall to me. There were more girls ruined around that lot and turned into public prostitutes than you can count.

And now they are coming running back to God. This is point I've been trying to make.

Do you see the pieces of the puzzle coming together? Because I sure as hell don't.

But you say: "Look here, Mr. Sumday, can't a man dance with his wife?"

"Dance with whom?"

"His wife?"

You old lobster! You don't want to dance with your wife! It is some other fellow's wife. You had just as soon go out and husk corn all night by moonlight as to dance with your own wife.

Wives are for locking up and keeping the covers over than parading around with in the street at night under the lamplights. Did you all lose your heads?

No wonder that the world is not being brought to Jesus Christ.

People say to me: "Well, didn't they dance in the Bible?" Yes, they danced in the Bible, and they committed adultery, too; and they got punished.

And so too will these pornographers who now seem fit to come running to God when it's convenient on their watch.

I just have one more thing to say and that is this: a man drinks without women, and you gamble without women, but you make men and women dance alone and you will kill the dance and you know it. Say, if you dance because you like to dance, you can dance with some old lobster just as well as with a woman. The German and other round dances are favorites, and the liberties taken would not be tolerated anywhere else in the world.

When you die you don't send for the dancing master to pray over you.

And that's just about all I have to say regarding that matter.