"Utahns, famous for their wholesomeness and frugality, buy online pornography at higher rates than the rest of America."
That's right, the folks in favor of 'traditional family values,' the very same people who consider themselves morally superior to almost everyone else in the country, those moronic Mormons who hail from the land of plural marriage but spent so much money in support of Prop 8 and the one man/one woman ideal, have also spent their hard earned dollars on one of the very things they claim to abhor and be above: Cyber splooge-y sex for funsies. Go ahead, take a moment to snicker. I'll wait. This deliciously fun fact that has emerged about the desperate husbands on Hysteria Lane in Hypocriville was just one of the findings reported by Harvard economics professor Benjamin Edelman in his article "Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?," published in the most recent edition of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Edelman tracked subscriptions to a top-10 seller of online adult entertainment, comparing ZIP codes associated with all credit card subscriptions between 2006 and 2008, and discovered that Utah ranks No. 1.
That puts a whole new spin on BYU's favorite cheer, "Go, Cougars!":
The most porn-watching ZIP codes in Utah, "with unexpectedly high subscriptions relative to their population and broadband usage," are 84766 in Sevier County, 84112 in Salt Lake County, 84018 in Morgan County, 84006 in southwest Salt Lake County, and 84536 in San Juan County.
A color-coded map in the journal article shows only two states with subscription rates higher than 3.6 per thousand home broadband users: Utah and Mississippi. Utah topped the list, with 5.47 users per 1,000. (Edelman says he took into account the amount of broadband access available in various regions and adjusted his data accordingly; porn users tend to favor high-speed data transfer that can download lots of the steamy visuals quickly.)
Need I remind you that Utah is the home of Senator Chris Buttars, who just last month stated that the gay-rights movement is similar to Islam and "the greatest threat to America"? Need I also remind you that Mississippi is home to former senator and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who has equated homosexuality to alcoholism, kleptomania and sex addiction? I mention Buttars and Lott because Edelman also found that "subscriptions are slightly more prevalent in states that have enacted conservative legislation on sexuality." In the 27 states where "defense of marriage" amendments have been adopted, Edelman reports that there were 11 percent more porn subscribers than in other states. If that doesn't give you a good enough reason to speak out against Prop 8 (and show up in San Francisco this Thursday [details below and here]), I don't know what will. Edelman also found that use of Internet porn is higher in states where more people agree with the statement "I never doubt the existence of God." Why is that? My guess is that because Christians acknowledge that they're sinners from the get-go — their sins are the reason why Christ died, after all — there's no reason they can't believe in God and download porn at the same time. Remember, according to Christians, a sin is a sin is a sin; there are no degrees of sin. Watching a XXX-rated video on a computer is no worse than lying to your wife, and no better than taking pictures of her naked and selling them to www.sexychurchwives.com. In fact, what some religious consumers of porn might tell you is that God is in favor of trolling the Internet for sexual pleasure, because He's a fan self gratification. Where's their proof? In Ecclesiastes 9:10: Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol [death or grave], to which you are going. I don't know enough about the Book of Mormon to know if there's a similar sentence in it, but I know enough about Joseph Smith to believe that if he were alive today, he would have left his golden plates and Urim and Tummim where he found them, just for a chance to go online and view the 590,000 pages of, say, naked Uma Thurman pics. And the best part is, he wouldn't have to make up a religion or marry her afterward. But just in case I'm wrong, I'll share Edelman's answer with you. In an email exchange with Utah's Deseret News, he wrote, "Looking at the relative popularity of online adult entertainment among Utah consumers, one possibility is that Utah consumers find it difficult to obtain their desired adult entertainment through retail purchases. … As a result, Utah residents may be buying online (hence appearing in my dataset), whereas people elsewhere buy retail (hence not in my dataset)." That makes sense, too. Hypocrites conceal their true feelings and motives; they can't grovel publicly for what they claim to hate. Just ask Todd Freestone, a Logan, Utah, psychotherapist, who works with sex offenders at his Comprehensive Treatment Clinic and isn't at all surprised by Edelman's findings:
Freestone has done searches on Google Trends, typing in words ranging from "swimsuits" to "naked girls," and found that Utah ranked No. 1 or 2 in most searches. A similar exercise by Deseret News reporter Lee Davidson in 2007 found that Utahns were more prone to search for words like "topless" and "pornography" (as well as "Jesus" and "home storage").
And that brings us to the moral of this story about devilishness in the land of phony morality, a truism that isn't a moral at all, but rather an observation: Fans of Jesus need containers for their porn, just like everybody else. Final Note: On the morning of Thursday, March 5 in San Francisco, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments on the validity of Prop 8, 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Marriage equality supporters will be gathering outside the California Supreme Court building at 350 McAllister Street in United Nations Plaza. With financial support from the Courage Campaign and many others, our friends at Marriage Equality USA are setting up a JumboTron so thousands of people can watch the proceedings together. © 2009 Kim Ficera
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