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Drowning an abstinence advocate in a garbage can full of water, blowing up zombie pro-life protesters with giant condoms shot from a gun, cooking a pro-life senator in a boiling cauldron – these are all things Planned Parenthood thought were so funny and so clever that they included them in a promotional video put out by its former Planned Parenthood Golden Gate affiliate in 2005.

After pro-lifers raised an outcry that spilled over into the media, Planned Parenthood pulled the “Superhero for Choice” video from their website without comment or apology.

At this point Planned Parenthood would simply love it if everyone forgot that they ever created and published a video depicting violence against pro-lifers as funny, and caricaturing pro-life activists as zombies and creeps. But in the age of Youtube, that simply isn’t going to happen. Take a look at the video yourself.

Remember, any video like this would have had to have been written by a writer, created by designers, vetted by management, published online, and then promoted by Planned Parenthood.

And we’re the extremists?

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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.

Anti-porn activists often face this accusation: You’re right-wing prudes. You just hate sex. But what many fail to realize is that there have been many left-wing thinkers—even far left-wing thinkers—who saw porn for precisely what it is: Exploitation, dehumanization, and victimization. They are intellectuals who, regardless of how much and how often I disagree with them on other issues, are at least consistent when they say that they oppose the exploitation of women and girls.

Let me give you a few prominent examples.

Of the feminists who did speak out against pornography, writer and intellectual Andrea Dworkin was by far the most vehement. Having read some of the same research that she did, and spoken to many people whose lives have been torn apart, like she did, I can understand some of the full-throated fury that comes through in her lectures, her writings, and her books. In Pornography: Men Possessing Women, she eviscerated her comrades on the Left for their acceptance of pornography:

“Poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, whores…The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.”

Her work is chilling to read, because she uses crude and graphic language to create a horror in her audience as she describes pornography for what it really is. Knowing the state of our porn-soaked university campuses, I wonder what the audience at a lecture she gave at the University of Chicago Law School felt:

“Dehumanization is real. It happens in real life; it happens to stigmatized people. It has happened to us, to women. We say that women are objectified. We hope that people will think that we are very smart when we use a long word. But being turned into an object is a real event; and the pornographic object is a particular kind of object. It is a target. You are turned into a target. And red or purple marks the spot where he's supposed to get you.”

And I wonder what all of the pseudo-Marxist fanboys I went to university with would think if they knew what Noam Chomsky had to say about pornography. When asked about it in an interview, he was abruptly dismissive:

“Pornography is the humiliation and degradation of women. It’s a disgraceful activity. I don’t want to be associated with it. Just take a look at the pictures. Women are degraded as vulgar sex objects. That’s not what human beings are. I don’t see anything to discuss.”

He went further when asked the most common question porn defenders like to bandy about: Didn’t these women choose to be in the porn industry?

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“The fact that people agree to it and are paid,” Chomsky replied, “is about as convincing as the fact that we should be in favor of sweat-shops in China where women are locked into a factory and work fifteen hours a day and the factory burns down and they all die. Yeah, they were paid and they consented, but that doesn’t make me in favor of it. So that argument we can’t even talk about. As to the fact that it’s some people’s erotica, well, that’s their problem. Doesn’t mean I have to contribute to it. If they get enjoyment out of humiliation of women then they have a problem.”

Radical feminist Naomi Wolf takes it a step further—she says that pornography not only degrades and humiliates women, but seeks to replace them entirely. Men don’t need real women anymore, since they can type the specific woman, specific sex act, specific anything into a Google search bar and the depraved depths of the Internet will vomit up their preferred perversity.

In Wolf’s words:

“The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as ‘porn-worthy’…Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond “More, more, you big stud!”)—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?... Today, real naked women are just bad porn…

The young women who talk to me on campuses about the effect of pornography on their intimate lives speak of feeling that they can never measure up, that they can never ask for what they want; and that if they do not offer what porn offers, they cannot expect to hold a guy. The young men talk about what it is like to grow up learning about sex from porn, and how it is not helpful to them in trying to figure out how to be with a real woman. Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out, how to find each other again…”

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

One of the most devastating takedowns of porn in the world of left-wing literature has to be Chris Hedges’ 2009 masterpiece Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. I disagree with him on why things are the way they are, but his diagnoses of cultural decadence are masterful, and his descriptions feel like punches. In Chapter II: The Illusion of Love, Hedges spends nearly 33 pages dismantling the porn industry and exposing the sexual violence with the precision of a surgeon:

“The porn films are not about sex. Sex is airbrushed and digitally washed out of the films. There is no acting because none of the women are permitted to have what amounts to a personality. The only emotion they are allowed to display is an unquenchable desire to satisfy men, especially if that desire involves the women’s physical and emotional degradation. The lighting in the films is harsh and clinical…Porn, which advertises itself as sex, is a bizarre, bleached pantomime of sex. The acts onscreen are beyond human endurance. The scenarios are absurd…Those in the films are puppets, packaged female commodities. They have no honest emotions, are devoid of authentic human beauty, and resemble plastic. Pornography does not promote sex, if one defines sex as a shared act between two partners. It promotes masturbation. It promotes auto-arousal that precludes intimacy and love. Pornography is about getting yourself off at someone else’s expense.”

The reason that much of our society refuses to recognize pornography as glamorized, recreational cyber-rape is simply because too many people are consuming it. Pornography is normalized and joked about on nearly every comedy sitcom on TV. Many porn stars make cross-over appearances in music videos and Hollywood films. Porn conventions are packed with sad, pathetic men trailing about to get fan-selfies with porn girls half their age. It’s no wonder that some of the more intelligent culture warriors of the Left look at their revolutions of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s with a dispirited and downcast gaze—they didn’t manage to liberate sex, after all. All they did was hand it to the corporations and capitalist carpetbaggers that always follow revolutions to mangle and mass-market.

And then, if many intellectuals of the Left and Right are to be believed, they all but destroyed it. As Christopher Buckley, the left-leaning son of the great right-wing icon William F. Buckley noted: “As anyone who’s had even a fleeting experience of porn knows: porn is to Eros what crack is to joy: an industrial-quality stimulant, an attaching of jumper cables to the libido.”

On porn, Noam Chomsky has it right. We should want no part in it.

RELATED: Neuroscience has proved that porn is literally making men’s brains more childish. Seriously.

There’s something darker beneath the surface of the James Deen scandal. There is much more to the story here than a porn star who has allegedly sexually assaulted women. In fact, it has a lot to do with what we as a society are willing to consider “sexual assault” to begin with. The Judeo-Christian framework for sexual morality has been dismantled, and the secularists have erected a single, flimsy barrier between the predators and the prey: Consent.

Consent has become the all-important standard for what constitutes an acceptable sexual interaction. No longer is marriage, dignity, mutual respect, love, or even affection important (the most truly vomit-worthy development in the continually metastasizing cancer of the Sexual Revolution is the concept of “hate sex.”) If consent is given — which means, in the vast majority of cases, the girl saying yes to the guy — then no one has any right to pass judgement on what happens next, regardless of how degrading, humiliating, or brutal it is.

That’s why most debates about pornography go something like this:

Anti-porn guy: How is it okay to call women horrifying names, choke them out, hit them, and perpetrate extremely painful sex acts on them?

Person who watches porn: They gave consent. So it’s all fine.

Anti-porn guy: But I thought calling women misogynist names and literally using weapons and restraints on them was something all civilized people opposed?

Person who watches porn: Chill out, dude, it’s just fantasy.

Anti-porn guy: Okay, but first, it’s not just fantasy. It is literally happening to the girl in the porn movie. And don’t you think there’s something creepy about seeking your sexual jollies watching girls get mauled on-screen? Don’t you think that your choice in fantasy speaks to something deeply problematic about how you see women?

Person who watches porn: Whatever.

An example of this is what alleged rapist James Deen used as his defence against the accusations of sexual assault: he cited a scene in which he was viciously slapping a girl across the face during intercourse, but stopped when she burst into sobbing and said she didn’t want to do that, and pointed out that the porn industry is full of examples of male performers refusing to stop. Once the girl signs the contract for the shoot, many porn directors feel no need to shut down the proceedings if she gets hurt or scared.

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But stop and think for a moment. This should make you incredulous. That James Deen ceased to viciously slap a girl is his defence. Whether or not the girl consented to the violence, no one can possibly deny that the porn industry produces sexual violence as a matter of course.

Which brings me to a truly troubling article put out last week by Mic.com, a wildly popular site that targets young people. Titled “What this professional porn villain can teach us about sex and consent,” they admiringly profile Tim Woodman, one of porn’s top bad guys, on how he is very respectful and empathetic in spite of specializing in “abduction…molestation…and staged rape.”

Woodman gives a startlingly honest analysis of what he thinks people want. They want women to be rescued, he says, but first, they want all sorts of horrible things to happen to her while they enjoy watching it—“maybe even tortured, or worse.”

“That’s where I come in,” he says. “I’m everybody’s inner monster, doing the horrible things they secretly want to so they can enjoy their darkest desires guilt-free.”

Feeding the monsters. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

After all, anyone who follows the slow spread of venereal violence from the porn industry into the culture, from the fantasy-soaked minds of the young into terrifying situations in real life, knows that the violence is not being contained on porn sets - and it’s not just James Deen who finds his inner monsters becoming his external desires. The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde scenario plays out over and over for the teenage girls who find out that their sweet boyfriends having been using porn as a playbook - and that they’re expected to imitate porn stars.

For example. The Independent reported last week on a new study, highlighting some particularly disturbing findings:

A study on why teenage heterosexual couples may engage in anal sex has revealed a climate of coercion, with consent and mutuality not always a priority for the boys who are trying to persuade girls into having it…

The qualitative study found that anal heterosex appeared to be “painful, risky and coercive, particularly for women,” while males spoke of being expected to persuade or coerce reluctant partners…

There appeared to be competition between boys to have had anal sex with girls, while the main reason that young people also cited for engaging in the act is that boys “wanted to copy what they saw in pornography.”

Which is why, another British news outlet reported, doctors are horrified to find an influx of girls as young as thirteen showing up at their offices for a variety of treatments including stitches—because their bodies simply can’t handle the sex acts boys would like to re-enact from pornography.

As the evidence of what porn is doing to our minds, our relationships, and our culture continues to come out, slowly but surely, we’re going to have to do some soul-searching. We’re talking about an entire society that is hooked on pornography. People cling to the flimsy concept of “consent” to excuse the misogyny and savagery that pornography promotes and portrays. Because I’m sorry—if your idea of a fantasy is the fear in a girl’s eyes, or screams of pain, or some woman being slapped to the ground, then whether or not she consented to this assault is the least of your problems.