TORONTO, December 13, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – A new study suggests that pornography use makes church-going men more tolerant of abortion. For moral conservatives, the news dovetails with another recent study showing porn use increases men’s support for homosexual ‘marriage’.
The study, titled “Does Religious Attendance Moderate a Connection Between Pornography Consumption and Attitudes Towards Women?”, argues that church-attending men who use pornography begin to tolerate abortion because of their “cognitive dissonance” regarding their sexual behavior.
Kyler R. Rasmussen of Mount Royal University and Taylor Kohut of the University of Toronto said that they “found that those who reported consuming pornography had more egalitarian attitudes than those who did not, but this difference was stronger among those who attended religious services more regularly—those who would be likely to experience dissonance when consuming pornography.”
By “egalitarian attitudes” the researchers mean positive “attitudes toward women in power, women in the workplace, and abortion.” It should be noted that Rasmussen and Kohut assume that it is “progressive” and “egalitarian” to believe in so-called abortion rights.
They write that the “attitudinal shifts” resulting from use of pornography by religious men can be partly explained by “the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.” This theory suggests that attitudes can be changed when people behave in ways that “are in conflict with those attitudes.” When people who think porn is bad use it anyway, their behavior causes “cognitive dissonance” and the resulting discomfort changes their opinions about porn and, “by extension,” other sexual matters.
The authors, who refer to a large-scale survey conducted in the United States to present their findings, state that religious conservatives become less conservative when they use pornography. In their study, they write:
“In the case of religious conservatives, pornography-related dissonance could not only serve to liberalize attitudes toward pornography and, by extension, sexuality, but also other conservative beliefs that support those attitudes, including beliefs about female subservience and dependence [sic]. Because of this, pornography might be more likely to alter egalitarian attitudes amongst those who should feel the most dissonance when consuming it—namely, those whose religious practices imply strong condemnation of pornographic material.”
The study, which was published on November 29 on the online “Journal of Sex Research,” cites a 2007 work by Mark Regnerus, Forbidden fruit: Sex & religion in the lives of American teenagers. Regnerus, who does not conflate abortion support with “egalitarianism”, observed in his recently released Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy that the use of porn erodes religious belief and is a “very significant predictor of men’s support for same-sex marriage.”
“It may be, at least in part, a passive byproduct of regular exposure to the diversity of sex found in contemporary porn,” Regnerus wrote.
The Rasmussen-Kohut research into conservative Christians builds on other published findings regarding pornography’s power to change attitudes. A 2016 study co-authored by Taylor Kohut that also appeared in the Journal of Sex Research, “Is Pornography Really about ‘Making Hate to Women’? Pornography Users Hold More Gender Egalitarian Attitudes than Nonusers in a Representative American Sample,” illustrated that “porn users are more apt to identify as feminists” and support so-called “egalitarian attitudes” towards women’s employment, leadership and abortion.
In Cheap Sex, Mark Regnerus cited Kohut’s 2016 study and said, “You think technology cannot change people’s minds? It may be time to reconsider.”
