Florida House Approves Resolution Declaring Porn a Public Health Risk

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The Florida House of Representatives has approved a resolution that recognizes pornography as a public health risk.

“[P]ornography is creating a public health risk and contributing to the hypersexualization of children and teens,” H.R. 157 reads. “[P]ornography objectifies women, normalizes violence and the abuse of women and children, depicts rape and abuse as harmless, and is related to the increased demand for sex trafficking, prostitution and child pornography.”

It notes that 27 percent of young adults between the ages of 25 and 30 state that they viewed pornography even before puberty, and says that because of the easy accessibility of the Internet, a number of children are wrongfully exposed to graphic sexual images.

Youth may engage in sexual behaviors as a result, or may have low self-esteem or develop eating disorders, the resolution explains.

“[R]ecent research indicates that one can develop a compulsive disorder in which excessive amounts of pornography are consumed, resulting in the user consuming increasingly more shocking material or withdrawing from daily life functions to satisfy the compulsion, and … pornography can have a detrimental effect on families, including a reluctance to enter into marriage, dissatisfaction in marriage, and marital infidelity,” it further laments.

The resolution, passed on Tuesday, was sponsored by Rep. Ross Spano, R-Dover, who is also running for attorney general. Read it in full here.

Some lawmakers were upset that the bill passed this week while Florida legislators declined to hear a proposal that would ban assault rifles and large capacity magazines in the aftermath of the Majority Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that took the lives of 17 people.

According to the Associated Press, Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, asked Spano if pornography had ever killed anyone or caused physical injury, or if it had caused any first responders to have to obtain professional counseling.

“He was saying porn as a health risk was more important to address here in the Florida legislature than the epidemic of gun violence,” Smith asserted. “These are there priorities. … I’m not aware there’s a base of voters who are losing sleep every night over the epidemic of pornography as a public health crisis.”

As previously reported, a number of states have considered resolutions declaring pornography to be a public health crisis, including Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, South Carolina and Virginia. The 2016 Republican Party platform also included an amendment on the dangers of porn.

U.K. preacher J.C. Ryle (1816-1900) once said, “The Christianity which is from the Holy Spirit will always have a very deep view of the sinfulness of sin. It will not merely regard sin as a blemish and misfortune, which makes men and women objects of pity and compassion. It will see in sin the abominable thing which God hates, the thing which makes people guilty and lost in his Maker’s sight, the thing which deserves God’s wrath and condemnation.”

“It will look on sin as the cause of all sorrow and unhappiness, of strife and wars, of quarrels and contentions, of sickness and death—the curse which cursed God’s beautiful creation, the cursed thing which makes the whole earth groan and struggle in pain. Above all, it will see in sin the thing which will ruin us eternally, unless we can find a ransom—lead us captive, except we can get its chains broken—and destroy our happiness, both here and hereafter, except we fight against it, even unto death.”