The following comes from a September 5 story on the Catholic News Agency website.
Citing connections to human trafficking, a major Scandinavian hotel chain has announced that it is eliminating pornography channels from its hotel rooms.
“The porn industry contributes to trafficking, so I see it as a natural part of having a social responsibility to send out a clear signal that Nordic Hotels doesn’t support or condone this,” said Petter Stordalen, the owner of Nordic Hotels.
A Norwegian billionaire and philanthropist, Stordalen announced that he is removing pay-per-view pornography channels from his chain’s 171 Scandinavian hotels and replaced them with contemporary art.
He said he decided to stop selling the material after he started to work with UNICEF’s campaign to help the child victims of human trafficking and sexual exploitation, who number over 1.2 million annually, the British newspaper The Guardian reports.
Stordalen said the move may seem “shocking and unusual,” but he compared it to the initially unpopular ban on smoking.
“We were the first hotel chain in the world to ban smoking and people thought we were crazy. Now it’s totally normal for public spaces to be smoke-free,” he said.
The move was applauded by Princeton law professor Robert George and prominent American Islamic scholar Hamza Yusuf.
“The pornography industry is corrupt through and through—inherently so,” George and Yusuf said in a Sept. 4 essay for Public Discourse.
“It should come as no surprise that it is connected to something as exploitative, degrading, and dehumanizing as human trafficking. Bravo to Petter Stordalen for refusing to continue profiting from peddling the industry’s wares.”
The scholars wrote a letter to hotel executives in the United States last summer asking them to consider removing pornography from their establishments because it reduces women to “a sexual object” rather than a “precious member of the human family.”
….Pornography policies in U.S. hotel chains vary. Omni Hotels and Resorts stopped selling pornography in 1998. Marriott has said it is “phasing out” pornography sales, while the Hilton chain has defended its continued sales.
To read original story, click here.
So, the cost is 1.2 million children exploited annually, the cost of what we had to get to before we realized that pornography and its related moral poison(s) are intrinsically evil. And Thomas Aquinas figured that out about, oh, say the 1200’s. Oh what a wise and advanced age this is and people we are now.
I find it interesting that the Norse, who “pioneered” (for lack of a better word) the open toleration of pornography, seem the first to pull back. At one time most of the world’s child-porn originated in Denmark. Now Iceland has banned all internet porn and it may be interesting to see who follows. Our liberals always loved to cite Scandinavia as being in the “advance” of things. Will they follow its lead now?
I commend all the people involved in this ban. I am sure God and St. Nicholas will bless all of your for it, too. Your countries and others will be better places and children, teens and the abused more protected because of this ban also. If we want our sons and daughters to be respected, we must respect those of others also. It is just that simple.
If the pay per view adult film industry simply used “amateur adults” instead of teens and very young adults that problem would be substantially reduced. Stiff prison sentences is the best recourse for these mugs, but if hotels have specific information about trafficking on the films they actually show, then banning those videos in their hotels is a good step. There’s noting wrong with married couples viewing an adult film with adult performers but the human trafficking of children and teens, and 18 year old sex slaves is a problem that cries out for justice. Throw the book at these gangsters.
Yes, there is something wrong with married adults viewing pornography according to Catholic teaching. You are paying for someone to fornicate, commit adultery, sodomy, etc. and you are lusting after someone else’s body other than your spouses.
Pornography was once defended to me as “the only possible objection I could have, is that someone is watching it.” I say, “Exactly.” Look what indifference to the sexual saturation experience has wrought us over a couple of generations. It is time to speak up. If we refuse to be silent about the offensiveness of the porn industry by patronizing hotels and motels who don’t serve it up, we can change the market for it and sex crimes. Just ask at the time of making reservations, if the hotel offers/promotes porn to its guests. Refusing to stay at such places costs them more than the few bucks they makes reselling porn.
There are plenty of books on sexology by reputable medical professionals for married couples with drawn pictures to help them in their relationship. Also, there are good Catholic books that tell the dangers of anal and oral sex. No one needs to use pictures of actual couples engaged in the sex act.