Utah’s #1! In porn consumption…

This was last week’s big story on the Bloggernacle (before it got edged out by HBO’s temple antics).  I meant to post something about it here at The Visitors’ Center (since Mormons-n-porn is one of our favorite subjects!) but what is there to say?  So Mormons look at a lot of porn on the Internet.  Surprise, surprise!  Unless you’ve been sleeping through General Conference for the past few years, you already know it.

Aside: I don’t listen to General Conference myself — I prefer the Bloggernacle-digest version.  You get all the juicy bits — plus entertaining commentary — without sitting through the snoozer talks.  And if one thing is certain, the Bloggernacle-digest version has the porn subject covered, but good!

So, as I like to do when I have nothing of my own to add to a subject, I’ll just give you an index of what everybody else is saying about this:

Naturally, the reaction of the culture warriors on the liberal side was somewhere between gloating and “I told you so!” — viewing it as a morality tale about hypocrisy and authoritarianism.  Pharyngula sums it up, and similar discussions appeared on Silence of the Clams, Gene Expression, and Main Street Plaza.  And Good Reason added to the theme by tying in a few related (unintentionally) humorous t-shirts like the “EX-Masturbator” ones and some homoerotic Mormon ones.

Naturally, the faithful blogs favored re-analyzing the statistics.  After all, the study didn’t cover anywhere near all the types of porn available, and Utah isn’t all Mormon.  Mormon Matters discusses these flaws, and points out the low rate of porn consumption in (heavily Mormon) Idaho.  Chris Smith (faithful, but not Mormon) takes the Idaho example a step further and suggests that Mormonism works better as a subculture than as a dominant culture.  Eugene Woodbury covers these flaws as well, and adds

However, the popular perception that Edelman is onto something might explain why Mormon church leaders are so obsessed with the subject. Though this obsession has also made online porn the current “sin of choice” among Mormons, the confession of which being used (as a moral “theory of everything”) to absolve all others.

Then there were some blogs that decided that — despite the flaws in this particular study — maybe it’s a good time to open up the discussion again and try to understand what’s going on.  The LDS Stake Medium Council asks what are the implications for the church if these trends continue.  And BCC posted 50 conversations about one thing.  Actually, I’m not really sure where these conversations came from or where BCC was going with them, but maybe someone here can explain it to me…