The week of Oct. 29 through Nov. 4, 2017 has been designated as “Pornography Awareness Week” by government officials across the state, county, municipal, and township levels throughout Richland County, Ohio.

Last year, eight of the nine municipalities in the county in concert with the “White Ribbon Against Pornography” campaign, raised awareness to the public on the harms from pornography.

The naked truth is that pornography is devastating lives, destroying relationships, and breaking up marriages. Nearly every American family has seen its impact.

The “1986 Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography” defined pornography as “material that is predominantly sexually explicit and intended primarily for the purpose for sexual arousal.”

Interestingly, in a landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling, the Court did not interpret the freedom of speech to include obscenity and considered obscenity to be outside the protection of the First Amendment.

Suffice to say, speech in our local history that is protected under the First Amendment involved leading pastors from sixty-six area congregations in 2015 calling for a day of prayer, repentance, and fasting from the societal sin of immorality; specifically the use of pornography.

It is no small matter that this past spring of 2017, 14 clergy sent a letter to METRICH regarding suspected human trafficking at a local massage parlor. With the assistance of local law enforcement, the business was shut down.

Attorney Laura Lederer, a founder of America’s anti-trafficking movement, warned, “We should not say that pornography leads to sex trafficking; pornography is sex trafficking.”

All things considered, social scientists across the board warn that regularly viewing pornographic images could adversely alter the brain. Their research suggests that pornography’s intense stimulation of the brain brings about significant changes to the brain similar to drug addiction.

While Americans find pornography "morally unacceptable" by a two-to-one margin in a 2016 Gallup poll, the eye catching reality is that the pornographic industry annually makes more money than the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and Major League Baseball combined.

In 2015 an explicit video sharing internet site reported that people around the globe viewed 4,392,486,580 hours of its content equaling 501,425 years! If that didn’t make your head spin, 54,000 cases of “revenge porn” involving extortion appear on Facebook news feeds every month!

Due to excessive social costs, the five states of Utah, South Dakota, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas have officially declared pornography a dangerous epidemic and a public health crisis. In fact, one of the two major political parties has also declared pornography a “public health crisis “in its party platform.

Public requests have caused a ripple effect, with corporate giants like McDonalds, Starbucks and Hilton Hotels now blocking pornography from their WiFi networks and video on demand.

It bears worth repeating that the eye is the lamp of the body, if the eyes are healthy, the whole body will be full of light.

While pornography tries to pull individuals thru a maze of unfulfilled expectations, with a moral compass and persevering leadership, there is light at the end of tunnel.