Mark Morford, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle explains how important “Protection from Pornography Week” is, or was. An excerpt:

After all, porn ruins families. And communities. And children. And puppies. And the upholstery. This is the government line. This is what they would like you to believe. This is why they invented Protection from Pornography Week. Because you need to know They Care. They are on guard. Because you, as always, are under attack. Here is the message: Despite how porn is a multibillion-dollar, record-breaking, insanely popular, widely accepted, gigglingly discussed, generally harmless, often exceedingly sexy and fun and unstoppable force of skin and fake orgasm and cheesy background music and money shots and thrust thrust thrust, it doesn’t really matter. It is pure evil, they say. And it’s coming for your children. Unless, you know, it’s not. Unless porn remains merely that beloved slippery devil so reviled by every sanctimonious group in modern history, that final frontier of bogus moralism and excessive alarmism and puffed-chest indignation and oh my God who pray who will save the children. Statistics are of little use over at the official government PPW site. They do not talk about anything so frivolous as details, such as the porn biz raking in upward of $12 billion per annum, which is more than ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox combined. Or that the combined subscriber base of Penthouse and Playboy exceeds that of Newsweek and Time . Or that more money is spent on porn than on, say, church. Or the NFL. Or Starbucks. Or socks.

Heh.