You Can't Avoid the Damage From Pornography

Whether you buy [pornography] or not, you will be greatly affected by those who do.  The aesthetic and moral environment in which you and your family live will be coarsened and degraded. . . . 

The externalities of depictions of violence and pornography are clear.  To complaints about those products being on the market, libertarians respond with something like “Just hit the remote control and change the channels on you TV set.”  But, like the person who chooses not to run a smelter while others do, you, your family, and your neighbors will be affected by the people who do not change the channel, who do rent the pornographic videos, who do read alt.sex.stories.  As film critic Michael Medved put it: “To say that if you don’t like the popular culture, then turn it off, is like saying if you don’t like the smog, stop breathing. . . . There are Amish kids in Pennsylvania who know about Madonna.”  And their parents can do nothing about it.

Can there be any doubt that as pornography and depictions of violence become increasingly popular and increasingly accessible, attitudes about marriage, fidelity, divorce, obligations to children, the use of force, and permissible public behavior and language will change?  Or that with the changes in attitudes will come changes in conduct, both public and private?  We have seen those changes already and they are continuing.

Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p.151, 152