Originally published in The Daily Maverick.
A number of the self-appointed guardians of South Africa’s moral fabric have recently weighed in on DStv’s news that it is considering introducing a pay-per-view pornography channel. As previously reported by Kevin Bloom in The Daily Maverick, Taryn Hodgson of the Christian Action Network claims that the channel will fuel the “fires of sexual abuse and exploitation”, and that those who believe otherwise have “imbibed the lies of the porn industry”. Errol Naidoo of the Family Policy Institute cites sympathetic studies (including one from a right-wing Christian organisation, and another from a high-ranking Freemason’s address during the 1989 ‘Religious Alliance against Pornography’ conference) which purport to demonstrate a connection between pornography and sexual violence. The trade union Solidarity claims that “children’s rights will be violated” by this channel, based on their own research indicating that “77% of molesters of boys and 87% of molesters of girls used pornography”. Continue reading »
The Christian Action Network’s (CAN) “international coordinator”, Taryn Hodgson, seems to be on some sort of PR offensive. Last month, she was accusing the Cape Times and Argus of denying the “hidden holocaust” of abortion, and more recently, she took time out from being upset at things to offer an apology for the lies told by CAN around an aborted debate between Peter Hammond, myself and Tauriq Moosa. This apology has now resulted in the editing of some text on the reports of that debate – it’s still deeply misleading (you can read the document trail here, if you like), but it’s at least something, and even a recognition of some wrongdoing is at least progress towards becoming a decent and honest human being. But in her most recent foray into the scary territory of making arguments, we can unfortunately detect no improvement in her reasoning abilities since that time she pretended to be a student, back in March 2009. This time the subject of her disapproval is DSTV, who are currently trying to gauge public interest in the addition of a pornography channel to their offerings. Continue reading »
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