She looks young, younger than her 18 years. Sitting on a bed in a hotel room wearing baggy pajamas, glasses, and a far-away look, she looks at the camera and says bluntly, “A lot of s**t in my life has been ruined because of sex.”

It is then that you see her eyes. They look somehow old.

Hundreds of thousands of fans know her as Belle Knox, one of the most popular names in porn. The media often refers to her as the “Duke University porn star,” after a classmate revealed that she was paying her tuition by starring in porn shoots. We later discovered that the name her friends and family know her by is Miriam Weeks.

She has been touted far and wide as proof that porn can be empowering and evidence that feminists can sell their bodies as objects and still be, well, “feminist.” Here, porn supporters told us with satisfaction, is a nice girl from a Catholic home who loves to do porn just because she loves sex. Porn is, as Weeks told the cameras, “empowering” and “freeing” and “the way the world should be.”

And then, recently, Weeks did a series of interviews for an upcoming documentary. In them, she paints a much different picture than the freeing, empowering, sex-fueled fantasy world her fans and porn supporters claim she inhabits.

Is it any wonder that many fathers have a harder time connecting with their daughters, when they spend countless hours watching girls their daughters’ age being beaten up, raped, and subjected to every imaginable type of sexual degradation?

“The sex industry has a way of making you very cynical and very bitter,” a tired-looking Weeks tells an off-camera interviewer, “In a way I’ve started to become kind of a bit bitter and a bit cynical.”

Why? “It teaches you to be street smart and not to trust people…I’m so used to being on the lookout for scammers, people who are going to try pimp me out or traffic me. I think my experiences have aged me. I don’t have the mind of an eighteen-year-old. I have the emotional baggage of someone much, much older than me.”

Some of this baggage is what propelled her into the porn industry in the first place.

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In many interviews, Weeks talks obsessively about how porn gives her control over her own sexual destiny: “In porn, everything is on my terms. I can say no whenever I want to. I am in control.” Later on, we discover why this is so important to her: Weeks reveals that she had been raped. “What porn has done for me,” she says firmly, “is it has given me back my agency.”

Even amidst the perverted adulation of porn-addicted fans, however, she still bears the scars of self-loathing. In some cases, literal scars. One day looking in the mirror, she became so overcome with self-hatred that she smashed the mirror and cut herself, slicing the jagged letters “FAT” into the flesh of her thigh. Thus, the reactions of many who found out that she had done porn shoots – who called her “ugly” and “a dumb whore” and said that she “should die” - proved devastating to Miriam. It is this ugly misogyny that increasingly fuels many porn viewers, and gives delusional publications like Salon the excuse they need to claim that working in porn has not hurt Miriam Weeks, but only opponents of porn who try to “shame” her.

Listening to Miriam tell her story, it boggles my mind that people can still defend the porn industry, or call it “empowering” or “the way the world should be.”

Miriam herself admits that her first scene, shot for a company she refers to as “Facial Abuse,” was “a really, really rough scene. I wasn’t prepared for how rough it was. It was weird having some random photographer watch me have my a** kicked on camera.” She talks about getting literally torn up during porn shoots. She admits that porn shoots in which she was physically beaten up until she sobbed were probably shoots she should have refused. Yet she didn’t.

The control is a myth too, of course. The porn industry has many ways of coercing the human beings they market into doing what they want. For one shoot, Miriam recalls almost tearfully, her agent wouldn’t tell her who she had to “work with.” When she arrived at the set, she realized he was fifty years old. She wanted to leave, but then she’d have to pay a 300 dollar “kill fee,” the director would have been furious, and, she says, she could never have worked for that company again. So she did it.

“I felt like crying during the entire scene and afterwards I was really, really upset,” Miriam says tearfully to the camera, looking like nothing more than the hurting 18-year-old girl she is. “I just thought of my mom, who was always there for me and always protected me…I think about my mom a lot when I do porn scenes. Just how sad she would be that her little daughter was doing this.”

And Mrs. Weeks’ little daughter does these things in part because of the demand. The demand of creepy grey-haired men twice her age or more who line up to get her photo autographed at porn conventions. Is it any wonder that many fathers have a harder time connecting with their daughters, when they spend countless hours watching girls their daughters’ age being beaten up, raped, and subjected to every imaginable type of sexual degradation?

Miriam Weeks, we see in her heart-breaking interviews, is just a hurting 18-year-old girl being used by an industry that takes girls like her, exploits their insecurities, promises them empowerment, and then subjects them to abuse and degradation until they can’t handle it any more. Then the carnivorous recruiters simply go out looking for fresh flesh to feed the baying cannibalistic mob, burning with insatiable lust and shouting their demands for new girls, new girls to degrade and discard.

A new day, a new human sacrifice at the altar of Eros.

The more fortunate girls realize they need to leave the industry. One of Miriam’s friends has told her that when she can no longer distinguish between her porn alter-ego and herself, it’s time to leave. Miriam is not quite sure what this means, she tells the interviewer, but she finds it interesting.

“People see Belle, but they don’t see Miriam,” she says sadly, “I think I’m…Miriam right now?”

And for all the world, she sounds as lost as our morally bankrupt culture.

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Jan. 27, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) - Reading the news these days, I’m reminded of a practice used for generations by the inhabitants of the Amazonian jungles. When crossing rivers with their cattle, they would need to ensure that the razor-toothed piranhas wouldn’t detect them splashing through the water. So a weak, old, or sickly cow would be led upstream and forced into the water. As the piranhas shot in for the kill and reduced the hapless animal to glistening bones in a matter of minutes, the rest of the herd would cross the river before the piranhas were done devouring the scapegoat. One dies so the others can escape without being noticed.

It’s hard not to get the feeling that the same thing is happening in our culture right now. Euthanasia, for example, is creeping in with barely a whimper. Sure, the same few tireless anti-euthanasia warriors who have fought this in the courts for decades are still trying to rouse people to action. But who else seems to care, really? Many church communities feel secure in the knowledge that they run their own faith-based care facilities and thus their beloved elderly ones will be safe. Others take their aging parents into their own homes if the time comes, and so do not think such policies will impact them.

Few consider the implications of giving doctors the right to kill.

Each time a rule is broken, society shrugs its shoulders, and says, “I’ll allow it.” And the piranhas are kept busy for just a little longer.

Because that’s what boils down to. Those advocating for truncation of human lives are carefully sanitizing every term so we won’t notice what is actually happening. The promotion and facilitation of suicide as a “medical option,” for example, is now nauseatingly referred to in virtually every media outlet as “physician-assisted dying.” Rather than pointing out that doctors are ending the lives of patients and discussing what could go wrong in such scenarios, we’re told that we would be inhumane to deny people “death with dignity.”

We should know, instinctively, that this is all rather disturbing. Andrew Coyne highlighted this brilliantly in the National Post when he asked whether doctors preparing to give the “patient” a lethal injection would have to sterilize the needle. I wondered in a column last week how doctors summon the next victim from the waiting room: “Excuse me, Ms. Adams, the doctor will kill you now.”

Those advocating for euthanasia ceaselessly appeal to our humanity, begging us to consider someone in the final, agonizing stages of dying, insultingly insinuating that there can be no dignity in such circumstances. They let slip their true beliefs, lurking just beneath the surface of their eye-watering words: Their lives aren’t worth anything anymore. They have no quality of life anymore. Let them die with dignity. Or, just as accurately: Let us kill them with medical efficiency.

In reality, it is humanity that is being lost. We no longer believe in human exceptionalism, because the underlying belief here is that we have no soul. That once the poison finishes coursing through our veins and we breathe our last, that’s it. Curtains closed. There’s no sense that death might not be the end, and that self-murder being our final action might have consequences. That’s why it’s okay to talk about putting Grandma to sleep like some beloved family pet. There’s no awe for the precious gift of life, and no solemn reflection about what implications these actions might have for the life beyond.

It’s the unspoken reality in the current debate—as muted as it is—on euthanasia. Those of us who oppose euthanasia have a much different view of life and death than our materialist opponents. We have a much different view on what dignity really is. We don’t see death as a solution. We especially don’t see killing as a solution.

But we’ve come a long way down this road now. Decades of horror stories leaking out of the abortion industry have not swayed those who championed its legalization—with a few prominent exceptions. That euthanasia is being used not as a last resort, but as suicide-on-demand in Europe is ignored by those who argue that for the dying to have dignity, they must die faster. More specifically, we must kill them. And we Christians plod stolidly on, deluding ourselves in the belief that the piranhas will not eventually turn their attention back downstream.

Whether or not one believes that humans have souls, and that there is life after death, surely we can all agree that giving medical professionals the right to kill people is a horrifying mistake. Surely we can look across the ocean to countries who have already been where we are, at this moment, and chose to step forward into a world where the depressed, the disabled, the blind, the old, the very young, and even the unwilling can be dispatched by doctors. Each time a rule is broken, society shrugs its shoulders, and says, “I’ll allow it.”

And the piranhas are kept busy for just a little longer.

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Jan. 18, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) - Every once in a while, I read something that strikes me as microcosmic of how ridiculous much of our society has become. While we’ve made incredible advances in so many fields, we seem to have forgotten the basic, instinctive knowledge that humanity once possessed as our birthright.

Knowledge, for example, like the fact that sex makes babies.

Lest you should think I’m exaggerating, I could give you a half dozen examples off the top of my head of guys I’ve met that seem to have completely forgotten this fact. They’ve been so convinced by their porn and their entertainment that sex is a recreational activity that when their reproductive organs work and they end up procreating, they seem downright bewildered.

One fellow at the University of Calgary—he was in third year philosophy, I think—approached me at a pro-life display and demanded to know what he was to do if he got a girl pregnant “by accident.”

By accident? Did you trip and fall or something? If you engage in sexual intercourse, which often leads to reproduction, you cannot claim to be confused or surprised when it works like it’s supposed to.

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Another university student informed me that he had gotten his girlfriend pregnant by accident. “I don’t know how that happened!” he whined. Really? Are you sure you don’t know how that happened? Because I wasn’t even there and I can tell you how it happened.

This brings me to a truly cringe-inducing story published this weekend in the Toronto Star, titled Doctor sues mother of his child for emotional damages. Given the headline, you might assume that the mother of his child had somehow been negligent or abusive to said child. But nope.

From the Star:

When a man and a woman of a certain age have unprotected sex, there is always the possibility a baby will be made.

Such are the facts of life with which, one would assume, a doctor is familiar.

And yet a 42-year-old Toronto physician recently tried to sue a woman with whom he’d had a casual sexual relationship for more than $4 million in damages, claiming “non-pathological emotional harm of an unplanned parenthood.”

Did you get that? This fellow—over forty, and a medical professional—is claiming that some woman he was sleeping with has caused him emotional harm because the act of him sleeping with her caused her to get pregnant.

The petulant and promiscuous papa was angry because the woman he was casually having sex with said she was on the pill, and, whether she was or she wasn’t, she ended up getting pregnant. He, like a good modern-day gentleman, assumed the woman he was extracting fleeting pleasure from had turned her reproductive system into a chemical playground to ensure that they could continue to have casual coitus free of any consequences.

But as the Star reported:

But then DD got pregnant, and PP wasn’t pleased, so he sued her.

Superior Court Justice Paul Perell threw out PP’s statement of claim last week, without permitting him the opportunity to amend it, finding there was no legal basis for his lawsuit.

“The case is certainly precedent-setting because no one has ever tried to do this before,” said DD’s lawyer, Morris Cooper, who characterized PP’s argument as “really a claim for wrongful pregnancy and birth.”

DD, a 37-year-old medical practitioner who is now the mother of a healthy 10-month-old child, is pleased with the decision, her lawyer said.

I suppose that’s a silver lining, if such a thing is to be found in such a pathetic tale. But considering judges have a bad habit these days of awarding damages in “wrongful birth” lawsuits and all sorts of other grotesque miscarriages of justice, relief is rational. The judge even sealed the case and hid the identities of those in the case, for fear that one day the baby in question might grow up, find the court records, and realize that he was the occasion for the lawsuit. And that further, if his father had finished sulking about his fertility and decided to show up once in a while at that point, the son would be exposed to the fact that this guy was, in fact, a colossal jackass.

After all, this “father” (“sperm donor” seems more accurate) had the guts to sue for this reason:

“To use the language of the statement of claim, PP was emotionally harmed because he was deprived of the choice of falling in love, marrying, enjoying married life and, when he and his wife thought ‘the time was right,’ having a baby,” the judge wrote in his 18-page ruling.”

Yeah, you read that right. Read it and weep. The gaping canyon between reality and this guy’s sense of entitlement is unfathomable. Biological reality, set in motion by his actions, had trumped the Walt Disney happy ending he was apparently yearning for. Of course, if he’d wanted that to be the case, perhaps he should have been looking for a long-term, serious relationship rather than tramping off to bed with, as he put it later, “some random girl.”

He asked her to get an abortion, of course. She said no. So he sued:

“DD committed an independently actionable wrong through misconduct that represents a marked departure from ordinary standards of decent behaviour. Her conduct was sufficiently malicious, high-handed and highly reprehensible such that it offends the court’s sense of decency.”

He therefore said he should be entitled to punitive damages “to achieve the objectives of punishment, deterrence and denunciation.”

Yes, indeed. How dare this woman’s reproductive system function in such a way that engaging in intercourse resulted in pregnancy—and how dare she not hire some feticide technician to suction that human being into shreds before he was old enough to bother his father with demands for attention and acknowledgement.

Ladies and gentleman, a lovely example of the post-modern man. 

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Jan. 13, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) - I’m no longer shocked by anything I uncover when I’m researching the porn industry. But when PornHub, the Internet’s largest online sewage facility, released statistics for 2015, I felt sick.

A couple of examples:

People watched 4,392,486,580 hours of porn on PornHub in 2015. Just to put that in perspective, that means that in one year, people around the world spent 501,425 years watching pornography—on one porn site.

On PornHub, people watched 87,849,731,608 porn videos. As the porn site hastened to point out, that’s 12 porn videos viewed for every single person on the planet.

To help us put these numbers in context, we can look at a new study published by the Journal of Communication on December 29, 2015, titled “A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies.” Studies like this are very important—not because we don’t already know that pornography is creating a violent new ideology of sex, but because the porn industry is constantly trumpeting completely useless and misleading research that makes hilariously stupid claims, such as that porn could make you more feminist.

In their blunt abstract, the authors explain what they learned:

Whether pornography consumption is a reliable correlate of sexually aggressive behavior continues to be debated. Meta-analyses of experimental studies have found effects on aggressive behavior and attitudes. That pornography consumption correlates with aggressive attitudes in naturalistic studies has also been found. Yet, no meta-analysis has addressed the question motivating this body of work: Is pornography consumption correlated with committing actual acts of sexual aggression? 22 studies from 7 different countries were analyzed. Consumption was associated with sexual aggression in the United States and internationally, among males and females, and in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Associations were stronger for verbal than physical sexual aggression, although both were significant. The general pattern of results suggested that violent content may be an exacerbating factor.

In other words, millions, if not billions, of people are consuming a harmful product that is impacting their view of women and, in many cases, leading them to develop violent fantasies, fetishes, and attitudes.

Don’t believe me? You don’t need to take my word for it. Increasingly, porn stars are coming out to warn the public that hey, getting ideas about sex from porn products may not be that particularly healthy for your relationship. Like Rocco “Italian Stallion” Siffredi, for example—a man “perhaps best known for sodomizing a woman while plunging her head into a toilet and flushing it.” Siffredi, The Daily Beast reports, has begun a new campaign to warn people of the dangers of watching the horrifying material he spent much of his career producing.

RELATED: This former porn star is exposing porn’s secrets: and it should make you very, very uncomfortable

From The Daily Beast:

He was an early champion of the rough and dirty before it went mainstream. James Deen, the former porn sensation now mired in rape allegations, once called Siffredi his idol…Siffredi, born Rocco Antonio Tano, warns Italy’s Minister of Education that young men’s knowledge of sex is largely informed by head-in-toilet anal sex scenes instead of “dialogue, listening, openness” at school.

Before it went mainstream. Read that over again, and then think about it. That’s the kind of thing that has now gone mainstream. And why? Well, the production of “rough-stuff” was “driven by the market.” People wanted to watch women humiliated. Beaten. Violated. Millions and millions of them. And now, Siffredi wants to warn people that they have perhaps taken his films a bit too seriously:

For example, despite how it goes in the films, not all women react with unrestrained enthusiasm when their lover spits on them, pulls their hair, or slaps them in the face with his ‘truncheon.’

Well, you don’t say.

It’s time for us to stop underestimating the porn problem. If we care about the women and girls in our society, we’ll start treating pornography like the cultural cancer it is. No more “boys will be boys.” No more “it’s a harmless sexual outlet.” No more “all guys do it,” as I heard one Christian speaker say recently—because no, they don’t. We need to take this seriously, or our churches will drown in a sea of filth right along with the rest of the culture.

RELATED: The James Deen porn scandal is so much worse than what’s being reported

Jan. 4, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) - It’s a common complaint in pro-life circles: Why is it often so hard to get the churches involved in social causes? We know that Christians have abortions, too—so it is impacting us personally. We know that Christians are, for the most part, very anti-abortion—so it’s not as if they disagree with the pro-life movement. So what is holding so many people back from getting involved?

Apathy is part of it. Lack of awareness is part of it. But by and large, the real reason is an attitude that runs much deeper. The answer is simple: Church-going people are often traditional, conservative people. And here I don’t mean those terms in the way that political analysts might use them, to describe specific policy positions. I mean simply that they are people who want to work hard, raise their children, and be left alone.

Prayer is out, queer theory is in, and many a middle-aged conservative has found occasion recently to splutter his coffee and gape at his newspaper: “How did things change so fast?”

“Have you ever met a parent of nine kids who was a Democratic activist?” Dennis Praeger once asked wryly. Everyone laughed. Perhaps not everyone even knew why it was so funny—it was just an absurd thought. Such a parent, everyone presumes, would have better things to do. People like my grandparents, who immigrated virtually penniless to Canada from the Netherlands in 1953, began working the land, and raised eleven children on a farm they built through blood, sweat, toil, and tears. They were too busy raising children and putting food on the table to trouble themselves with the screechings of Canadian feminists and other such activists.

Herein lies the problem the pro-life and pro-family movement has in recruiting conservative people to engage the culture to combat the social ills infecting our society: There is something fundamentally foreign about “activism.” Indeed, the term “conservative activist” itself seems to be something of a contradiction in terms. Small-c conservatives and traditionalists do not want to change the world. They want to live in it and not be bothered.

It’s in the very root of the word—“conserve.” It is markedly different in temperament from “liberal,” which denotes “liberalizing”—action. Thus, many suspicious church people even find that the word “activism” carries with it a whiff of liberalism. Ambrose Bierce brilliantly encapsulated the contrast between these two temperaments when he defined a conservative as, “A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the liberal who wishes to replace them with others.”

Which brings us to our present unpleasant realization that from a cultural perspective, the traditionalists and conservatives have been thoroughly beaten in the war for the culture. For the most part, we never even showed up. We raised families, built farms and businesses, and attended church functions while secular revolutionaries took over the entertainment industry, the media, academia—and finally, the public education system that now dutifully serves as a conduit for secular “values.” Prayer is out, queer theory is in, and many a middle-aged conservative has found occasion recently to splutter his coffee and gape at his newspaper: “How did things change so fast?”

They didn’t, of course. The Sexual Revolution has been unfolding now for over sixty years. But now, for the first time, people are beginning to wake up and realize that what is happening is not something we can ignore, because very rapidly, it is beginning to happen to us. Already, the influences of the entertainment industry and pornography are showing in the youth. It’s why Christian publications mourn the rise of “sexual atheists”—people who still believe in God, but just don’t think His rules apply to their sex life. Churches across North America are hemorrhaging young people as the public education system dutifully does what it was put in place to do: Plant skepticism, undermine the beliefs of any children from Christian homes, and then send them off to university so that the faculty there can finish the job. It’s why enormous numbers of Christians lose their faith during university.

The government, too, will no longer leave us alone. As I wrote previously concerning Ontario’s war over sex education, the government needs the ability to re-educate children into the values of their secular system, and will go to war with parents for the right to do so. In some European countries, children are being taken away from their parents because Christian beliefs could “harm” the children—and some academics are already suggesting that Christianity could, one day, be “treatable.”

Conservatives want to be left alone to raise their children. The unfortunate fact is that we won’t be.

The secularists never had any intention of letting us carve out enclaves where we could live in peace—and a stream of legislation like Alberta’s Bill 10, which would force home-schoolers and private schools to change their teaching on sexuality, is simply the most recent evidence.

This is why the tables have been turned. Now, it is secular progressive ideology that is the status quo, having successfully infiltrated and established itself in every major institution. They have achieved a new status quo, and we traditionalists have been left with nothing left to “conserve” in the first place. We can no longer be Chamberlain giving up territory bit-by-bit—we are now the frog in boiling water, and have to decide how to confront these encroachments to retain the freedoms we need to live as Christians in a society that increasingly holds us in contempt.

How can one be a conservative in a society with nothing left to conserve and everything to fight for? It’s a pressing, imminent question that demands our attention. The twofold task of passing our Christian beliefs on to our children and preventing the government from interfering in that process was once easy—we could just live and let live. That was always a questionable strategy, especially as it ignored the massive loss of life through abortion happening in our own towns and cities. Standing up for our pre-born neighbors is not just a “cause,” but a biblical command. But now, it is in our self-interest to engage. It is not just the children of others we should be worried about, but our own. We will not have the luxury of raising children the way our parents and grandparents did. The time to speak Truth to power is now.