This is Nancy Pearcey, in the Public Square.
College students have a new way to make the grade: watch pornographic movies.
Many colleges now offer courses where students analyze hard-core pornography. They're even required to shoot their own explicit films to show in class. It's a new trend called "porn studies."
How did students go from studying Plato to studying porn?
The answer is that sexual license has become respectable-a way to discover your "true self." As one professor of porn studies says, "Sex is . . . the motive force of our beings"-our "ultimate" identity.
The underlying worldview here is naturalism: that we are products of nature, and find our core identity in biology, in the instincts-primarily the sexual instincts. That's why moral restraints are seen as harmful, and sexual liberation as the path to wholeness.
Clearly, the naturalistic worldview is not just in science classes any more. It's become a cancer permeating all our children's education.
I'm Nancy Pearcey
Copyright 2001 Nancy Pearcey. All rights reserved.
International copyright secured.
File Date: 11.09.01