Checking Out Porn

A small battle was one recently against pornography. The credit goes entirely to our Lord.

I recently found one of my students in possession of a book called Soul Eater. It is manga, a type of Japanese comic that is wildly popular, to say the least, with middle school and high school students. I asked to see the book when I caught sight of a panel feature an up-skirt depiction of a young girl's underwear. A brief flip through the book found much worse...a fully nude woman exiting a soapy bath, a hugely endowed woman smothering a young man's face with her breasts, multiple depictions of young women in low-slung jeans and tight crop tops, a picture of one character squeezing the breasts of two different woman and commenting on their sizes, and the absolute worst...two young women hanging by their bound wrists, breasts bulging out of their bras and panties slipping down their thighs. I was about to confiscate the book when I discovered that it came from our school's library.

Later, I checked the book out of our library myself. I put sticky notes on all the offending pages and went to see the librarian. I must admit that I was gearing up for a battle, expecting to be challenged with pathetic arguments about censorship. I prayed for our Lord to go before me.

When I sat down with our librarian and showed her the pictures, she immediately said she would pull it from the shelf. To be fair, no librarian can know what is on every page of every book, ours was grateful that I had brought it to her attention.

To my male readers, let me state right here that this is our battle. I do not know of one young man like my student who would not have looked at such pictures if he knew they existed. I do not care how faithful he is, hormones are hormones. I also know that such images, especially when viewed at his age, will be burned into the memory for a long, long time. Yes, woman are increasingly getting drawn into the use of pornography, but it is far and away aimed more at men. This is our battle. Not only must we pray and fight constantly against the onslaught on our own senses, we must be the ones who challenge our bookstores, grocery stores, and any store that sells so-called "soft core" and hard core porn. I am talking about the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. I am talking about Cosmopolitan and Maxim.

Is it censorship to ask that this be removed from the high school library? Who cares! It does not belong there, and we all know it. Fortunately, my school's librarian agreed. The very day I got involved in this battle against manga-porn, I came home to find that my wife had been using with our children a book filled with color plates from the Art Institute of Chicago featuring French art from the Renaissance. The difference was truly one of light and darkness. What I saw in a book from my school's library was cheap drawings of ugliness. What I saw in my wife's book was the gift of art used to raise the mind and the soul.

I will end by saying once again how pleased I was with the outcome of my library encounter. I am grateful to our librarian for removing the book. The honor goes to our Lord.