Church of England "Threatens" on porn.. oh noes!

I think being "threatened" by the C of E must be like being savaged by a half dead chinchilla; bizarre, not dangerous and you just end up feeling sorry for the chinchilla.

So what are the men who go around wearing frocks getting all hot under the dog-collar about today? Well if that bastion of accurate and unbaised reportage the Daily Fail is to believed "War on web sleaze: Church of England threatening to withdraw millions invested in ISPs over rise of internet porn. OK so you have "invested" these "millions" how exactly? That would be largely through shares sold in the open market I would expect, so you sell your holding and lose all that lovely dividend income, depress the share price which provides a buying opportunity to other investors who purchase these shares and raise the price. Your net contribution to "stemming the tide of these sick and depraved images" is the square root of fuck all.

Look, we have had porn forever, and "extreme" porn at that; there is a cave painting in southern France that is tens of thousands of years old, well before any form of civilisation existed, it depicts a crude stick figure of a human shagging some kind of animal. Porn isn't going to go away despite what you think your sky fairy would want. Rather amusingly and sticking with animals for a moment the much heralded "Extreme Porn" laws introduced last year get a mention along with the fact that hardly anyone has been proscecuted under these laws; well that's for a reason, it's nigh on impossible, with the exception of bestiality, to mount a case as to what is "grossly offensive... and realistic" (and you only get bestiality under the wire because it's pretty obvious its an animal and not a human) so all the cases have been for possession of bestiality images, and even there one case got dropped as the video clip in question was a CGI render (and cartoons don't count - so all you Furry and My Little Pony rule 34 fans are in the clear).

Of course the reason why this has all come to the surface is the recent Vincent Tabak conviction for murder where it transpires he'd been looking at "violent porn". The usual suspects in the Daily Wail and elsewhere start their knee jerk "It was the porn what made him do it" blissfully ignoring the fact that presumably these websites were not solely set up just for Vince and therefore tens if not hundreds of thousands probably paid these left handed mousing sites a visit and then didn't go on to strangle their neighbor. If you're the sort of person who would take someone's life I would posit that you're that kind of person and watching some S&M porn isn't going to make a blind bit of difference if you are going to act on your impulses - in fact I would say and the studies bear out that having a safety valve of knocking one out over some staged smut might just act as a safety valve*

The bishops might want to consider that before they sell their ISP shares and buy cassock futures and tofu bonds.


* incidences of sexual assault have decreased in countries such as Denmark and The Netherlands after the legalisation of porn.