CarnalNation

While the rest of us are celebrating May as National Masturbation Month, Shawn Larsen, the mayor of Rexburg, Idaho, has decided to guide the people of his town in the opposite direction. The good mayor, a devoted supporter of  Citizens for Decency, has declared May, 2009 "White Wristband Against Pornography Month." The proclamation was signed Wednesday, just in time for an anti-porn conference that was held this past weekend. (More, including paranoid anti-porn video, after the jump.)

Larsen's proclamation blames pornography for a plethora of ills, including "present[ing] youth with a false and distorted image of human sexuality," and "lead[ing] both children and adults into destructive sexual addictions." Inevitably, of course, pornography is held responsible for much greater and less abstract ills, including not only the breakup of marriages, but pedophilia and child abuse. Ynot.com's Darklady writes: "Larsen's proclamation claims that adult pornography is not only used by pedophiles to entice children into sex acts but inspires children to engage in sexually precocious behavior."

No matter what you feel about pornography, surely it's not too much to ask that if you're going to make objections to it, you at least stick to demonstrable facts. Larsen's first couple of assertions might be debatable, but the connection between adult pornography and pedophilia is simply made up out of whole cloth.  Maybe Larsen's Comstockery should encourage the rest of us to wank that much more during May to make up for the people of Rexburg, who apparently can't be trusted with their own libidos.

ETA: The world that Mayor Larsen and the Citizens for Decency is a terrifying one, as shown by the video below. In the world as they've conceived it, everything you hold dear can be blown apart at a moment's notice by a few images on a computer screen. Watch the video below, then imagine what it must be like to live a life where this is your reality.