This has been making the blog rounds today…

Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers

A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.

If you’re surprised about this then you haven’t traveled much in the bible belt.  I see more highway billboards advertising strip shows and adult entertainment dives when I take a road trip through the Fundamentalist States of America then anywhere else, except maybe Nevada.  But at least there they aren’t hypocritical about it.  Oh…and guess who is the biggest consumer of online porn in the nation. 

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.

Utah.  Where marriage is so sacred they pour millions into California last year to prevent loving same sex couples from being allowed to marry.  Nice.  The magic underwear isn’t working so well I take it.  Or perhaps too well.  Perhaps it was all part of a plan on the part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to drain money out of the faithful’s porn budgets.

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.

I keep thumping my pulpit on this but it keeps being relevant.  They need their scapegoats.  Gay people are their handy punching bags for all their own private secret shame, their own pathetic failures of moral character.  They hate us, because we learned to live with our sexual nature and they, locking it in the closet, never learned how to control themselves. 

Denial isn’t a plan for life.  The human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon.  Least of all religions founded by con artists.  No river rises higher then its source.