Steve Largent: “Mr. Speaker, there is a cancer in our culture today, and it literally is corroding our national character. The problem…”

“Mr. Speaker, there is a cancer in our culture today, and it literally is corroding our national character. The problem of illegal pornography is a cancer, eating away at America. Unless we begin to aggressively treat this cancer by prosecuting it as the law says and intends, it will continue to attack our marriages, our children, and our society. It used to be that we were concerned about the dirty little bookstore down at the end of the street and the problems of criminal behavior and declining property values associated with it. Now the aggressive marketing tactics of the pornography industry have brought such material directly into the family rooms, our schools, our libraries, and offices of millions of Americans. Do we think the social costs and community problems associated with those adult book stores have diminished just because it is on the Internet? Absolutely not. Instead, they have become more internalized and more destructive and more pervasive because of their accessibility, their affordability and the fact that you can now be anonymous.”