I watched The Office again last night. I might make it a regular thing. This one wasn't great, but it had a few killers, like Michael (the unintentional jerk) ingenuously asking an Indian couple during a nice conversation, "So, do you have the type of marriage that, when he dies, you have to throw yourself on a fire?"
I slept in daughter Tess' bed last night. She has another cold and isn't sleeping well. It seems to help the congestion if she sleeps while propped up, so she was on my shoulder for four hours. I'm lucky she's petite.
You wanna get scared? Check out this 2003 article that a friend sent to me about pornography. Excerpt:
Numerous research studies now document the link between pornography and sexual violence. Sex offenders can often trace the origins of their crimes in passions aroused through fixation on pornographic images. Before his execution, serial killer Theodore "Ted" Bundy confessed to an early fascination with violent pornography.
Pornography treats both the viewer and the viewed as objects to be used. It separates love and honor from the sexual ideal, and plants false and dangerous conceptions of sexual fulfillment in the minds of its viewers. It ruins lives, marriages, and families. And the pornography industry is laughing all the way to the bank.
Recent years have seen a surge in child pornography and a radical increase in pornographic images linking violence with sex. As the mainstream media and entertainment industry loosens its standards and embraces pornographic themes, the obscenity industry has been forced into ever more perverted portrayals of sexual images.
I detest porn. I hate it because it pollutes minds, distorts thinking, ruins neighborhoods, and leads to crime. Most of all, I hate it because it's stupid. You show me a porn lover, and I'll show you a guy who has lost a grip on reality in exchange for a shameful grip on something else.
I'm guessing this guy likes his porn: "The president of the National Association of Evangelicals, an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, has given up his post while a church panel investigates allegations he paid a man for sex." It reminds me of an anecdote I heard at a Touchstone conference years ago. The speaker said a huge conference of Christian men pretty much took over an entire hotel for a weekend (I'm guessing it was a Promise Keeper's conference, but the speaker didn't say). At the end of the weekend, the hotel owner reviewed the weekend's in-room sales and discovered that porn was easily the most popular room pay-per-view item.
Some day, maybe a really good book will get published that makes chastity and right-thinking about sex popular again. Could this be it? It's Dawn Eden's The Thrill of the Chaste, and it has a major publisher behind it (Thomas Nelson). Dawn is a recent convert to Catholicism. She's Jewish. Maybe she'll stand in the line of Edith Stein and Simone Weil (Weil never actually entered the Church, but she looked in a lot). We'll see if Dawn can tilt the culture a little.
