Rick Santorum has found a “pandemic,” which is destroying the moral fiber of our country. Porn.

Santorum is a blatant champion of religion in government, specifically his own brand of Evangelical Christianity. He has said that the Obama administration’s lack of Christian influence in policy making has allowed it to make serious invasions and restrictions of American freedoms, freedoms that are of course delegated to us by God.

I was surprised by Santorum’s minor deviation from championing and defending of personal freedoms and less government intrusion. He wants to better enforce laws that make pornographic and obscene materials illegal or harder to distribute. He is under the impression that the availability of such materials degrades to our society.

Perhaps it is. Some of Santorum’s arguments against porn are valid. He says that porn leads to the objectification of women and general misogyny in men. I don’t think anyone thinks that gender equality is better propagated by pornography, since the most profitable pornography is usually of women.

Santorum deals in absolutes. Porn isn’t inherently bad. Like most media, porn reflects the desires of media consumers. We watch war films to see acts of valor and heroism, we watch romantic comedies to see tender love and affection and happiness play out in such ideal ways that seem sometimes unattainable to the average viewer. Why did we make porn? Cause we want to experience sex like we experience anything else in a media form.

Sex is hard to have all the time. Sometimes we have to do other things like work and raise families and mow our lawns. The human race has also found that having too much sex is almost as bad as having too little. Being college students, we have seen the social implications of wildly sleeping around, not exactly the most endearing trait.

So how do we experience sex when we want it, but can’t get it? We make and consume pornography. Sometimes it’s really hard to go all the way to the bar, find someone you’re interested in, buy them a bunch of drinks and make them think you’re interesting, then take them all the way back to your house, and walk down the long and treacherous path of foreplay to sweet achievement. It really is a lot easier to open up your laptop and watch someone else do that. You can even skip straight to the good stuff.

People are going to fulfill their desires. Porn is a natural solution to a common problem.

We can’t enjoy sex whenever we feel like it, so we create media about it that we can enjoy when it’s convenient for us. We do this with all manner of media and all parts of society. Churches produce and distribute literature all the time, they use social networking and the Internet to reach the same vast audience that porn reaches every day.

It doesn’t matter what the information is, it should be able to be circulated and absorbed in a responsible manner. Rick Santorum thinks its wrong that pornography is so easily accessible, because he doesn’t agree with the connotations that pornography gives to sex. I think it’s wrong that he would choose to single out a single form of media and attempt to slow it’s distribution, as if the Internet would allow that to happen in the first place.

Prohibition of alcohol forced social drinkers into back alley criminal establishments that made them out to be immoral substance abusers. The prohibition of marijuana puts some of the most peaceful individuals in the same jail cells as violent crime offenders. The prohibition of pornography would further alienate people from their natural sexual desires, as if they should be ashamed for pursuing them through media. Only the serious right-wingnuts of this country are going to support such an invasion of personal freedoms, and Santorum just wants their votes.