Topic: CNSNews.com
A Feb. 26 CNSNews.com article by Penny Starr features criticism by conservatives of a Planned Parenthood website aimed at providing "medicially accurate sexual health information for teens on the Internet" (as well as engages in a bit of sham balance by stating that "Repeated requests for interviews with Planned Parenthood and teenwire.com staff by Cybercast News Service were not answered," though we can be virtually assured that should anyone from Planned Parenthood respond to the article, we won't see an update on it).
Starr focuses on the site's claim that "viewing pornography is a normal and 'safer' way of enjoying sex and in particular its telling a "young male viewer of pornography that masturbating while looking at pornography was not cheating on his girlfriend." This brings out not only the usual anti-pornography responses, as well as five paragraphs devoted to Ted Bundy:
Perhaps the most dramatic case of the damage pornography can apparently cause to some individuals was revealed when James Dobson of Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian group, met with serial killer Ted Bundy the day before he was executed on Jan. 24, 1989.
Bundy, who killed at least 28 females, including the 12-year-old girl whose death led to his arrest and conviction, requested the interview with Dobson.
"As a young boy of 12 or 13, I encountered, outside the home, in the local grocery and drug stores, soft core pornography," Bundy told Dobson, adding that "the most damaging kind of pornography - and I'm talking from hard, real, personal experience - is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces - as I know only too well - brings about behavior that is too terrible to describe."
Bundy said he didn't blame pornography and took full responsibility for the brutal rape and murder of more than two dozen women, but he said it is a contributing factor that caused him and other violent offenders' to act out.
"I'm no social scientist," Bundy said, "and I don't pretend to believe what John Q. Citizen thinks about this, but I've lived in prison for a long time now, and I've met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence. Without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography - deeply consumed by the addiction."
Nowhere does Starr note that questions have been raised about Bundy's statements to Dobson. Nted true-crime author Ann Rule wrote about the interview in her book on Bundy, "The Stranger Beside Me" (p. 446-7):
Two agendas were met with that videotape. Dr. Dobson believed that smut and booze triggered serial killers, and he had the premiere serial killer to validate his theories. Ted wanted to leave behind a legacy of his wisdom and humanity's guilt. He was guilty, yes, but we were guiltier because we allowed pornography to be sold. We walked by newsstands and did not demand that filthy literature be confiscated and outlawed.
[...]
I don't think pornograph cause Ted Bundy to kill thirty-six or one hundred or three hundred women. I think he because addicted to the power his crimes gave him. And I think he wanted to leave us talking about him, debating the wisdom of his words. In that, he succeeded magnificently.
The blunt fact is that Ted Bundy was a liar. He lied most of his life, and I think he lied at the end.
Rule adds (p. 448):
Ted Bundy's interview with James Dobson accomplished one thing that troubled me. During the weeks after Ted was executed, I heard from a number of young women. Sensitive, intelligent, kind young women wrote or called me to say that they were deeply depressed because Ted was dead. One college student had watched the Dobson tape on television and felt moved to send flowers to the funeral parlor where Ted's body had been taken. "He wouldn't have hurt me," she said. "All he needed was some kindness. I know he wouldn't have hurt me ..."
[...]
Even in death, Ted damages women. They have sent for the Dobson tape, paying the $29.95 fee, and watch it over and over. They see compassion and sadness in his eyes. And they feel guilty and bereft. To get well, they must realize that they were conned by the master conman. They are grieving for a shadow man that never existed.
