The next episode of XXXchurch.tv features a trip to the Democratic Convention and the Republican Convention to get the word out about internet safety. Watch the poor blue elephant just get destroyed and a whole lot more here.
Sam and his wife and Rachel Collins were off to NYC this past weekend for the Gay Porn Show. We will feature that whole trip on an upcoming video podcast. You can read the updates from the show here.
El Clinto, Donny, Shellie R. Warren and myself were down in Seattle for Porn Weekend. We kicked off the weekend wtih the first ever Porn and Pastries event. You can check out a news clip and more information about Porn and Pastires here. If you work at a church or go to a church, get ahold of us and lets bring Porn and Pastries to your church. We had over 350 women show up to this!
The Seattle Times had this to say about the events:
It was a church event billed as “Porn and Pastries,” and some 300 women, mostly in their 20s and 30s, paid $10 each to attend.
But there were no naked images at the EastLake Community Church in
Bothell on Friday night; the baring came when some of those attending
told about their private lives.
They were here, in many cases, because of what happens when a woman
finds out her spouse or boyfriend has been secretly spending a lot of
time looking at porn on the Internet, often while espousing Christian
values.
Type in “xxx” on a Google search, and 348 million results come up in 0.05 seconds.
“Porn and Pastries” was part of an anti-porn weekend at the church
that included “Porn and Pancakes” for guys and “Porn and Parents” on
Saturday, and a “Porn Sunday” today.
It is put on by a national group called xxxchurch.com, founded in 2002 by Craig Gross, 32, who recently moved to Las Vegas from Grand Rapids, Mich.
Vegas is Sin City, after all.
Gross is a former youth pastor who looks very much the part of a
rock band’s lead singer: skinny, with a cool hairstyle, and taking to
the stage in jeans and sneakers. He says he got the idea for the
xxxchurch from his youth-ministry days, and hearing about teens and
online porn viewing.
Now, he says, his anti-porn site gets 300,000 to 700,000 visitors a month, depending on the publicity it gets.
Porn and Pastries was the first women-only event that the xxxchurch
had done, as it stages more than 100 anti-porn gatherings a year, said
Gross.
It seemed appropriate that Porn and Pastries — a wide selection of
treats were available — was held at EastLake Community Church.
It draws a young crowd of 2,500 for weekend services at a converted
industrial warehouse that looks more like a nightclub than a
traditional church. Its 23,000-square-foot auditorium has a stage with
a drum set already in place for the rock music that’s played, along
with three overhead 10- by 20-foot TV screens and a booming sound
system.
Among those attending Friday’s event was a 31-year-old Seattle woman
whose husband told her a year ago, after five years of marriage, that
he was looking at porn.
The woman asked several times that her name not be printed. This is not something you want bandied around the neighborhood.
Presumably her husband could have used the “delete browsing history”
tool on his computer — although, she said, a woman just has a sense
that the man in her life is spending time on those Web sites. The
husband decided it was the Christian thing to do to tell his wife.
“Eww, gross,” was her reaction, the woman said. “Us women, we don’t
understand it, although I’m not surprised. I know many men look at
porn. But that gives them unrealistic expectations. People in those
movies are all done up, look great, and say ‘yes’ to everything.”
She said she’s talked with women friends about men looking at porn,
and the women universally have the same reaction: “What’s wrong with
me? Why does he have to look at something else?”
That’s why, she said, their home computer now has software that
monitors its Web history. If a porn site is detected, a report is sent
to the wife, as well as to a friend who’s helping them out.
“There is no privacy when you’re married,” she said.
The women at EastLake got to hear from Gross; from a couple whose
husband had had multiple affairs that he said were prompted by porn
viewing; and from a woman who said she had had 14 partners and four
abortions and now had been celibate for two years.
No sex before marriage is something that EastLake Pastor Ryan Meeks, 30, said “will make a marriage better.”
He said he and his wife, Michelle, did have sex before getting married 10 years ago, and that caused problems.
“We were addicted to the illicitness, taboo thing,” he said. “We had
to train ourselves that it didn’t have to be wrong in order to be good.”
Another woman attending the event was Heidi Green, 39, of Kirkland.
She’s divorced and said that men she dates know fairly quickly that she doesn’t believe in sex without marriage.
Asked how many men decide they’ll date someone else, Green said, “Probably 90 percent.”
If anything, the church events illustrated what has been historically Seattle’s split personality about such matters.
This weekend was an anti-porn weekend.
On Oct. 24 and 25, The Stranger is sponsoring “Hump!”, advertised as
“Seattle’s biggest, best and ONLY amateur and locally produced porn
festival.”
Some years ago, the late local historian Bill Speidel said about
this town: “See, Seattle has always had a split personality — the
swingers and the Christers. I don’t think many people know that the
first industry in this town was a whorehouse run by Mother Damnable.”