From a report about a new study:
Those states that … consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.
“Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” [according to the report’s author].
Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour.”
The top porn-consuming state? Utah. A map in the report indicates that Texas falls somewhere in the middle of the pack, but still ahead of a number of major liberal-leaning states, particularly California and in New England.
It must be like the old quote by President Harry S. Truman in the April 3, 1956, edition of “Look Magazine,” “I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.”
I have four boneless, center-cut slices of observed truth to offer up to the people of Texas. When you read these four observations of simple truth, please think about the Texas State Board of Education and whether these simple observations are really understood by that board. If you think not, please consider that their views on science education, sex education, and the meaning of the Christian faith may be equally misunderstood. The quotes come from a nationally and internationally well-known Christian minister and evangelist who is opposed to the Religious Right and the heartless new Christian fundamentalism that has emerged over the past 30 years. All four are from Tony Campolo:
1) Excerpt of a Speech Given to a Group of Christian Conservatives:
“I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said ‘shit’ than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”
2) Campolo is aghast at the way the right captured the term “moral values” during the 2004 campaign:
“It’s horrible. Jesus refers to the poor over and over again. There are 2,000 verses of Scripture that call upon us to respond to the needs of the poor. And yet, I find that when Christians talked about values in this last election that was not on the agenda, that was not a concern. If you were to get the voter guide of the Christian Coalition, that does not rate. They talk more about tax cuts for people who are wealthy than they do about helping poor people who are in desperate straits.”
3) Like many sincerely religious people, Campolo has little regard for America’s consumer culture:
“Christianity is countercultural. If one embraces Jesus, one has to raise some serious questions about the American way of life, especially its consumerism. Here’s a society that has us buying new cars all the time, and has got us caught up with fashion models, and every year, women and men are getting rid of their clothing because somebody in never-never land has decided that these clothes are out of style. What we are discarding in this consumeristic society, because the dictates of custom have decided are out of date, is appalling. People are spending huge amounts of money on cars that are basically status symbols, and it’s contrary to the teachings of Jesus. We are wasting so much money in catering to our pleasure, while we allow the basic needs of others to go unmet. [Advertising promises us that products will] “…meet our deepest spiritual and psychological needs and create well being, a sense of joy, give us friends, and make us young and happy. Jesus says, ‘Why do you spend your money on that which satisfies you not?’ ”
4) Another quote:
“What scares me is that Christianity in America today sees nothing wrong with being allied with political conservatism. Conservatives are people who worship at the graves of dead radicals. Stop to think about that. The people who started this country, George Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, these were not conservatives; these were the radicals of the time. In fact, conservatives always look back on people who they despised and make them into heroes. If you were to listen to the religious right today, they would make you believe that Martin Luther King was one of their flock. In reality, they hated him and did everything they could to destroy him.”
Do you have a link to the study? And how about the state maps you indicated…maybe even a breakdown by intrastate regions or counties/parishes?
We included a link to the report in the original post, but here it is again in case you were having problems with that link.