Christopher Manion, Ph.D.

Our purpose at this congress is “to generate international understanding of the current status of the family and to develop programs to strengthen it.” Believe me, it is well worth coming halfway around the world to deepen our understanding of the crisis facing the family—worldwide. We need to plan and to do whatever is necessary to preserve and protect the family, in our homes and around the world.

The issue I am addressing today – pornography – is uniquely international. It is worldwide, thanks to instant digital technologies, and it threatens every home, thanks to cable and satellite TV, and the internet. And soon, with emerging technologies, internet broadband will reach everywhere that has electric power.

I am here to tell you that this flood of filth can be stopped. But stopping it will require all of our efforts at education and participation in every level of society, including political action. Right now we can and must join together and work to pass an international treaty that will empower every country in the world to pull the plug on international pornography.

The family is the incubator of the truths and the habits that form virtuous citizens. To echo yesterday’s insight of His Eminence, Cardinal Lopez Trujillo: where the family flourishes, society flourishes. Where the family does not thrive, society may soon end up in a pile of rubble. Should that sad day every come to pass, I believe we will see, standing on top of that trash heap, a pornography peddler – and he’ll be smiling. And today that struggle is irrevocably international.

Pornography is an essential part of today’s culture of death. It is a primary weapon in that culture’s attack on the family. It denies every truth that the family represents. Pornography is a lie, a constant, violent falsehood disguised as a fantasy. For the victim families – families with pornography addicts -- it is a never-ending nightmare.

Pornography murders the family in the cradle. The strong hands of the husband and father should be constantly engaged to protect his family. But the hands of the pornography addict fondle imaginary, perverted, faraway strangers. That is why virtually all countries –some more strongly than others -- have made pornography a crime. In spite of this, pornography is everywhere -- in every home, on every computer, even on satellite channels like those at the hotel where I’m staying here in Mexico City.

It seems inevitable, unstoppable. But hard-core pornography – criminal obscenity – is just that: a crime. And we can end it.

Three hundred years ago, William Penn, the founder of the great state of Pennsylvania, observed that, "if we will not be governed by the laws of God then we must be governed by tyrants.” 

That basic foundation of liberty informed the labors of America’s founding fathers, over 200 years ago. They acknowledged -- in our Declaration of Independence -- “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” These laws are the indispensable, true source and guide for free societies. Just as we are endowed by our Creator with rights and liberties, so we are given the natural law that will preserve those liberties – but only if we obey it.

That means that we have the God-given right and duty to insist that our society follow the natural law, protect the family, and, specifically, to ban criminal pornography. If some people are offended by our efforts, so be it – a free society is not a suicide pact.

Fighting for the family is a constant battle – it’s like mowing the lawn. In many cases it’s a battle over language. If there were a “world congress for the destruction of the family” being held somewhere across town today, the malefactors gathered there would not be drawing up a declaration openly announcing their desire to destroy the family. Far from it. Since the time of Confucius, society’s enemies have understood that they must seize, pervert, and ultimately destroy the true meaning of words.

So the hotel I’m staying in doesn’t advertise its pornography as “movies for perverts.” Instead, it features “adult fare” for “mature audiences.”

Wait a minute. For the family, the adults are the mother and the father. They forge a sacred bond for life to sacrifice and care for one another and for their children. “Maturity” is the quality of character and leadership and formation necessary to that task.

The pornographer must pervert those words, and everything they represent. So he dresses them up with terms like “freedom” and “rights.” At that point, the popular culture trumpets the new vocabulary as cynically as Winston Smith did for Big Brother at the  Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel, “1984.”

The family is the first fruit of the natural law. To destroy God and His law, one must destroy the family. So the pornographers have taken dead aim at the family.

As Dostoevsky observed, if there is no God, everything is permitted. And in the pornographer’s world, nothing is forbidden. Not public sodomy, which he calls “gay marriage.” Not the murder of the innocent, which he calls “elimination of the products of pregnancy.” Not breeding test-tube babies to clone, and then to harvest their stem-cells to serve as nourishment for the culture of death, which he calls “progress.” Not the indoctrination of our children in sexuality, materialism, and nihilism in our schools, which he calls “education.”

In politics we have what we call “single-issue groups.” But it’s not possible to defend your family issue from attack by yourself. Whatever issue might be your specific professional focus, we’re all in this together – just like a family.

Juan Donoso Cortes, Marques de Valdegamas, said 150 years ago: evil cannot be static. It never stops at a pleasant level. It constantly moves further and further away from the good, towards perversion and destruction. The pornographic mentality cannot pause at an acceptable level of moderate indulgence, or what is sometimes referred to as “soft porn”: it must progress inexorably to total debauchery.

Psychologists and physicians who treat pornography addiction tell us that it quickly becomes much more powerful than cocaine addiction. That is why pornography is the number-one most profitable category on the internet. Most people turn it off, or delete the porn SPAM. But that one new customer who is enticed until he becomes an addict will buy everything he can. He will spend thousands of dollars, often in a few weeks. The addict can never view enough pornography. It is an endless fall into the abyss.

Yes, the pornographers have convinced most of their friends in the media elite that free speech and pornography will sink or swim together. So, no matter how vile pornography is, the media, political, and intellectual elites are not going to do our job for us and call it what it is. We just have to do it ourselves.

Don’t let the pornographers fool you. Pornography isn’t freedom of expression. It is a crime, against God, against nature, and against the laws of most of the countries represented here today.

In fact, in the year 1910, over fifty countries around the world agreed to a treaty that encouraged international cooperation in gathering information about “trans-border trafficking in obscenity” and in enforcing existing laws against it.

A second treaty, negotiated in 1923, was even stronger. Dozens of countries agreed to criminalize the commercial and international production and distribution of obscenity and to prosecute their own offenders and assist other countries in prosecuting offenders from other countries.

Officially, these treaties are still in force. When the United Nations was formed, they were adopted with protocols in 1947 and 1949.

So why is there an avalanche of international pornography today, virtually unimpeded?

Because these treaties were written before the internet, cable, satellite, and other digital means of transmission were heard of.

So today, these treaties are ignored. What international cooperation does occur in prosecuting pornography – usually child porn – is done on an ad-hoc basis between, for instance, the U.S. Customs service and a foreign police force, often in a city like London or Moscow.

Ladies and gentlemen, we need to have an up-to-date international agreement that will permit countries around the world to protect their families from this worldwide plague. And we can do it.

We can already build on the worldwide consensus regarding child pornography. There is a missing link in logic with people who oppose child porn, but who have no problem with the adult variety. Today, no one in this room can prevent a child who has access to the internet, a cable or satellite television, or even a digital telephone, from being confronted with hard-core pornography, whether he is looking for it or not.

Right now, at the United Nations, we are taking the first steps to achieve the kind of treaty that we need. We want your country to support and to demand that the treaties on international trafficking in obscenity be revised and updated to include all digital, satellite, cable, and internet transmissions. With such a treaty firmly in place, signatory countries can “pull the plug on porn” anywhere in the world.

And how does your country become a “signatory”?

That’s where you come in.

You need to support that effort. The group you represent needs to support it. Your country’s government and mission to the United Nations needs to support it and co-sponsor it. Every country represented at this congress should support it.

If we do our work well, every country in the world will support it.

Please understand that this effort is not a “snapshot” – it is a movie, a dynamic, a process that has many steps.

You can prepare for this. Learn who your justice and foreign ministry officials are. Invite them to your functions. Show them the evidence. Ask them if they’ve even heard of the treaties that are now in force – and you’ll be surprised to find that, even if your country is a signatory or has acceded to the treaties and their protocols, your highest-ranking diplomats have probably never heard of them.

And, once the new treaty is adopted and your country ratifies it, your work is not over. Once the new treaty language passes, domestic action in every single country in the world is required. It is called “implementing legislation,” and that is where your efforts will be critical to assure that your country’s domestic pornography laws are brought up to date. You will have to work long and hard to make sure that they are strong enough to pull the plug on porn everywhere. 

There are very specific ways to make this happen. Your group, your Church, your community, can make this issue the vehicle to growing stronger, more educated, more effective, more connected, more respected, and ultimately more successful.

As Patrick Fagan pointed out yesterday, family status has a direct and measurable impact on everything from violent crime to educational performance. 

So does pornography. Robert Peters, the president of Morality in Media, has an excellent new article on our website that details the relationship of violent sexual criminals in the United States with their use of hard-core pornography. Please read it, because it contains a gold mine of valuable information that will help you advocate stronger pornography laws in your countries. 

You and your group should immediately begin talking to your local law-enforcement authorities and legislators. Introduce yourselves. Tell them your concerns about violent crime. Every country in the world is overwhelmed with it. Your efforts to fortify the natural family – and to eliminate criminal obscenity – will directly assist your governments and your police and prosecutors. You can have a great effect, even on your local level.

You need to understand that these people are often reluctant to prosecute pornographers because they will come under sustained attack from the media elites who celebrate and propound the culture of death. But you represent the majority. So prove it. Support them, publicly, and, in doing so, you will build your organization and strengthen it.

Morality in Media has developed a website to help Americans encourage the prosecution of criminal obscenity. “obscenitycrimes.org” allows any citizen to make an online report of porn SPAM or obscene websites. We have experts in obscenity investigations review and validate every report. We then send affidavits to to the U.S. Department of Justice and to the federal prosecutor in the jurisdiction where the report originated. This assists our prosecutors, and it encourages them. It is a vital dimension of defeating criminal obscenity.

Let me assure you, your encouragement makes a great deal of difference – your participation does. Because politicians react to their supporters, and prosecutors react to to citizen complaints. In the United States, the previous administration did not carry out one prosecution of an adult obscenity case. This administration has vowed to do so – and even there, prosecutors have to be encouraged, supported, and, when they prosecute, they need to be commended and applauded.

Your efforts are important even on the most local of levels. If there are shops in your neighborhoods or towns that sell or rent pornography, encourage your local officials – elected and law enforcement – to strengthen, and to enforce, the laws against them. Encourage your local business community to help you – because pornography’s presence is always bad for every other business.

And, may I add, you can even complain to the manager of your hotel – right here in Mexico, tonight! And everywhere you stay – if the hotel offers pornographic TV channels. Tell him how offensive this is, and how it will ruin his business. In Cincinnati, one group has spoken with local hotels, and then picketed them. One by one, they cancelled the cable channels.

This works on the government level as well. In the United States we have tens of thousands of local officials. Most of them know little about how to use zoning laws – those are laws that forbid porn shops and sex facilities in certain neighborhoods or near schools, for instance -- to minimize pornography. You should do the research, or find it, and make it available to them. That will get you members -–active, powerful members and supporters – in every single locality in your country. And the internet – and that means pornography -- is available in every single home that has a telephone.

That’s how you build a grass roots group. You seize an issue that has virtually universal impact, you build universal support, and you become the driving force behind it. You shape the issue, and frame it in language that gives you the moral high ground in the coming battle. That’s how you win the people who have not yet made up their minds.

Remember,, pornography doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Pornography causes other crimes as well. And virtually everywhere, pornography production and distribution is part of organized crime.

Here’s a test: ask your hotel manager if he can guarantee that the pornographic movies he offers to his guests do not use sex slaves, kidnapped victims, or victims of violent criminal international sex trafficking, as subjects.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for an answer.

When your local prosecutors and elected officials start being active against pornography, your regional, state, provincial, and national politicians will take notice. They will want to support your issue and they will want your support.

The media will also take notice. They will attack you. When they do, celebrate! They will be giving you free advertising.

This will give you the foundation and recognition you will need to persuade your country’s national leaders actively to cosponsor and support the international effort to stop internet, cable, satellite, and digital pornography. That effort will be concentrated in the United Nations, but it will not be successful without the active support of thousands of people in every single country.

By the way, once you have their attention, you can educate them about all the other pro-family issues and recruit their support and, in many cases, help them save their own families as well.

Communication in this effort is not optional, it is essential. I have urged the sponsors of this Congress to create an internet conversation site where all of us can keep up on the situation, country by country, issue by issue, group by group. Everybody I have met here so far has a website and an e-mail address. Before we go, can we make absolutely sure that there is a central directory of our people and our organizations so that we can stay in touch with each other, help each other, and benefit from each other’s research and activities?

An Internet Family Newspaper that we could all contribute to and go to for news and contacts would be a wonderful vehicle for our work.

After all, the pornographers use the internet, why don’t we?

And learn how to organize. The profamily coalitions in the United States barely existed thirty years ago, and the grass-roots groups that now number tens of millions in members and supporters are the result of years of work. Teams went throughout our country, training students, church groups, community groups – thousands and thousands of activists who then built the organization in their own neighborhoods – and then lined up with other groups in what we call the “coalitions.”

There is a science to teaching this grass-roots organizing and action. Groups like the Free Congress Foundation in Washington have done it all over the world. If you have not had this kind of training, if your group has not yet reached this level, then make sure one of your leaders gets that practical, expert training in building coalitions. It will be indispensable as you grow, so that you can keep, educate, and activate the people who are drawn to your cause.

Let me sum up: there IS something you can do about pornography, even internet pornography. Organize and educate your people for action by supporting a strong treaty in the United Nations that will prohibit criminal obscenity by whatever technology it is transmitted.

The uniquely international character of internet obscenity calls on us to unite and fight together as an international community to pull the plug on porn. This Congreso Mundial is the perfect launching pad for that international grass roots effort. I look forward to working with you.