Monday, January 03, 2005


The Hypocrisy Factor
Every year, evangelical pollster George Barna and his Barna Group interview thousands of religious Americans (generally re-born evangelicals and Catholics) on their cultural attitudes, personal backgrounds and lifestyle choices. And each year, without fail, Barna churns out the facts the Christian right wishes it could ignore. But since Barna counts himself as an ideological soulmate of Falwell, Dobson and their ilk, however much his data strips away their veneer of moral piety, it can't be disputed....

...Born again adults who have been married are just as likely as non-born-again adults who have been married to eventually become divorced. Because the vast majority of born again marriages occurred after the partners had accepted Christ as their savior, it appears that their connection to Christ makes less difference in the durability of people’s marriages than many people might expect....

...In 2001, under pressure from an influential local antiporn group, Citizens for Community Values, prosecutors filed obscenity charges against two local video stores for selling adult videos. The Cincinnati Enquirer launched an investigation of community standards and found that:

"Last year, more than 21,000 Hamilton County residents purchased 26,000 explicit videos from one of the nation's largest mail-order companies. A company spokeswoman described those sales as typical for a community of this size. . . . In January of this year, 182,000 Greater Cincinnati residents -- an estimated 70,000 from Hamilton County -- visited an adult Web site at least once. Nielsen - NetRatings found that 21.8 percent of all residents here who went online visited an adult site. The national average for January was 21.4 percent. In recent months, Hamilton County residents bought adult movies on pay-per-view TV at about the same rate as viewers did in other mid-sized TV markets. The numbers suggest county residents are quiet contributors to the adult industry's rapid growth. And with every purchase, they change Hamilton County's long-held notion of a community standard."

Again, the community standard in Hamilton County -- which favored Bush over Kerry 53-47 percent -- was pretty much what it was everywhere else....