Military Porn Addictions Growing
by AFA Journal
January 5, 2007
(AgapePress) - - An increasing number of servicemen and women are confessing to pornography addictions and most government-run military base and post exchanges are only adding to the problem by selling it. In 1996, Congress enacted the Military Honor and Decency Act, which bans military stores from selling sexually explicit material, but according to Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, the act is not being enforced.
"Congress is going to have to take a look at this," Donnelly said. "Certainly the Pentagon is going to have to enforce those rules. It's a matter of good order and discipline and not just a matter of religion or free speech. It's a matter that the military itself needs to be concerned about."
Such concern is apparent among military chaplains like Father Mark Reilly, who recently returned from a Marine Corps tour in Iraq.
"I don't think I've ever been confronted as much face-to-face with men and women -- in and out of confessional -- saying, 'I'm addicted to porn and I don't know how to get out of it,'" Reilly said. "They're looking for a life preserver. It's wrecking their marriages. Like any addiction, they lose control."
Reilly said it's the combination of war stress and being away from loved ones that ignite the lust for pornography. Lust turns to addiction and addiction results in imitative behavior as seen in the Abu Ghraib photos -- made for and by porn addicts.
In The New Republic, Rochelle Gurstein described the Abu Ghraib photos as ones that "speak to the coercive and brutalizing nature of the pornographic imaginations so prevalent in our world today."
Archbishop Edwin O'Brien, who leads the U.S. military archdiocese, believes chaplains can play a big role in military porn sobriety by influencing "what is sold in the [exchanges], what's allowed in a public space, an office or a barracks, and I think a chaplain can have great leverage here."
The pornography that is sold at military exchanges is part of a $57 billion-a-year worldwide industry.
This article, printed with permission, appears in the January 2007 issue of AFA Journal, a monthly publication of the American Family Association.
