LETTER: Facts don’t back column

To the editor:

Richard Winters recently wrote an article in which he spoke out against a variety of immoralities and I disagree with him on every single subject. Firstly, the idea that pornography usage causes an increase in sexual assault. Pornography is a growing industry within the United States and worldwide. However, according to the United States Census Bureau, incidents of forcible rape in this country have decreased from 36.8 to 28.7 per 100,000 people over a period from 1980 to 2009. This time period coincides with the Internet’s exponentially increasing availability and thus pornography’s exponentially increasing availability. Only a person in a state of complete ignorance would suggest that there is a positive correlation between pornography consumption and sex crimes let alone attempt to imply pornography as the causation.

With regard to Richard’s views on homosexuality, no proponent of homosexual rights and liberties wishes to force the rest of the country to be gay. That is a textbook strawman argument. Think of it as a matter of religious freedom. If a preacher wishes to marry a homosexual couple, who are we to say he can’t? The government doesn’t force its way into your temples and churches and dictate to you how you can and can’t marry. So why do you expect the government to go to other people’s churches and tell them how they can and cannot marry?  

Finally, his issues with premarital sex and promiscuity indicate a serious lack of thought. I suppose the moral choice in this “dichotomy” would be to get married (assuming that monogamy is arbitrarily dictated as more moral than promiscuity). This would imply that it is only moral to have sex with your partner if given “permission” from a religious leader in the form of a social contract. However, suppose an atheist recognizes the inherent morality of monogamy, why should they be forced into a religious contract against their own beliefs? Is their monogamous sex with their partner inherently immoral simply because it is classified as “extramarital”? Also, people get divorced and remarry in this country. Is a person who has three sexual partners over their lifetime any more promiscuous than a person who has been married thrice?

Ben Maxfield