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Editors’ note: 

Articles you need to know about, summarized in 60 seconds (or less).

The Article: He’s Watching That, in Public? Pornography Takes Next Seat

The Source: The New York Times

The Author: Matthew D. Richtel, a Pulitzer prize-winning technology reporter

The Gist: Americans are increasingly viewing pornographic materials in libraries, gyms, airplanes, and other public spaces.

The Excerpt:

It is an issue playing out not just at libraries, but in cafes and gyms, on airplanes, trains and highways, and just about any other place where the explosion of computers, tablets and smartphones has given rise to a growing source of dispute: public displays of mature content.

The subject can put personal media on a collision course with personal morality. This is an era, after all, that celebrates people’s ability to watch what they want, when they want, but it also forces bystanders to choose whether to shrug, object or avert their eyes.

The Bottom Line: Acquiring pornographic material once required taking a public action—-buying a ticket to an X-rated theater, renting a tape from an “adult” video store, asking for a magazine kept behind a store counter—-and having the boldness to overcome the shame involved. It should come as no surprise, then, that as our culture becomes more accepting of pornography, those who were already comfortable with smut become even less inhibited and immune to public shaming.

What once was primarily a private sin has becomes a public plague. This soul-destroying sleaze has infested our nation, and many people who call themselves Christians have allowed it to happen. At most we turn a blind eye. But more often than not, believers are consuming pornography at the same rate as non-believers—-and doing so without remorse. In an age when so many Christian men have succumbed, and when Christian women brag on Facebook about reading Fifty Shades of Grey, why are we shocked to find nonbelievers bringing filth into the public square?

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