Rich Bordner’s column condemning pornography is, well, a poor piece of opinion – if there is such a thing. Besides being a nearly blow-by-blow duplicate of an article by Kirby Anderson on leaderu.com, he makes a few errors and omissions.First, he states that correlation does not equal causation, and then proceeds to imply causation anyway. Implying that porn causes rape could be like saying getting on the Dean’s List causes straight A’s. Clearly there is a high correlation between Dean’s List and a 4.0, but the former does not cause the latter, but rather vice-versa. Perhaps most damning is this statement by Marcia Pally, president of Feminists for Free Expression, during a Cato Institute Policy Forum in 1996: “Fifth, the claim that more sexual crimes occur in geographical areas where sexual material is more available is also without support. Studies in the early 1980s, notably by Drs. Larry Baron and Murray Strauss, suggested that areas with higher consumption of sexual material experienced higher sexual crime rates. In their later studies they discovered a confounding factor – the number of unmarried males between the ages of 18 and 30. When that variable is factored in, all other correlations disappear.”One need only look at Japan to see that a “sex-crazed” society can exist without large amounts of sex crimes – Japan has one of the lowest sex-crime rates in the world.Finally, it is possible to have unhealthy relationships with anything, be it pornography, alcohol, marijuana, or even God (Waco, for example). I don’t think the fact that a few people with bad relationships should ruin everyone else’s fun! Don’t harm my person or property, and you can do whatever you please – even look at dirty photographs.
Brian GuilfoosOSU Electrical Engineering alumnus