social issues: AFA-mail hilarity!

This one is a hoot!

My good and dear friends at the American Family Association sent me e-mail the other day and, though I've been slow to post about it, I couldn't resist.

The subject? "Pornographers Set To Go After Children With Cell Phones"

Shocking. Positively shocking!

"Soon pornography will be available to our children over their cell phones. Playboy hopes to make their porn available to the 170 million cell phone subscribers throughout North America. No doubt scores of other pornographers will follow Playboy's lead."

Do you get the sense that there's stuff here they're leaving out? I mean, just think about it.

"An independent study by IDC revealed that 33.2% of cell phone users in America, more than 55 million, are between the ages of 5 and 19." Yes, and apparently Playboy will indiscriminately send porn to ALL cell phone users for FREE without CHECKING who they're SENDING it to.

Oy.

Talk show host Paul McGuire of Los Angeles says of the Playboy effort: "…soon cell phones will open a tsunami of porn images…" He went on to say "just like the Internet, it will be hard to keep [this] sexual perversion from young people."

Because, of course, talk show hosts are always subject matter experts. The problem here, at least for me, is that the mobile phone industry is very tightly regulated. The Internet is not. The comparison is faulty.

But here's the funniest bit: "We can expect our children to have pop-up ads on their cell phones pushing Playboy's pornography. Playboy says their new venture will allow more people to experience 'the sexiness of the classic Playboy lifestyle.' Unfortunately many of these people will be our children."

Pop-up ads.

On cell phones.

Words fail.

Paper tigers and straw men. These people are just plain weird.