WASHINGTON–The Supreme Court has agreed to review a decision invalidating a federal restriction on child pornography.

The justices announced March 26 they would hear arguments in U.S. v. Williams, which came to them from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The high court will not consider the case until its next term, which begins in October.

The case involves convictions of Michael Williams for possessing child pornography and promoting, or “pandering,” material in a way that signals it consists of illegal child pornography. In 2004, Secret Service agents found on two computer hard drives at Williams’ home more than 20 images of minors engaged in sexually explicit behavior or displaying their private parts. A Florida resident, Williams was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment on both counts, with the terms to be served concurrently.

A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court, based in Atlanta, unanimously overturned the “pandering” conviction, saying the provision was unconstitutional on its face, being “both substantially overbroad and vague.” The court, however, upheld the five-year sentence for possession of child pornography.

The “pandering” provision invalidated by the 11th Circuit was part of a 2003 law, the Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today (PROTECT) Act. That law included a revision of a similar section in the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act, which was struck down by the Supreme Court.

Members of Congress designed both measures in an effort to deal with the use of computer-generated or enhanced images that appear to be of children involved in sexually explicit acts.

The 11th Circuit said in its April 2006 opinion that the PROTECT Act’s “pandering” provision still encompassed non-commercial material that deserves free-speech protection.

“Given the unique patterns of deviance inherent in those who sexually covet children and the rapidly advancing technology behind which they hide, we are not unmindful of the difficulties of striking a balance between Congress’ interest in protecting children from harm with constitutional guarantees,” the judges said. “However, the infirmities of the PROTECT Act pandering provision reflect a persistent disregard of time-honored and constitutionally mandated principles relating to the government’s regulation of free speech and its obligation to provide criminal defendants due process.”

The invalidation of the provision in the PROTECT Act is part of a series of setbacks in Congress’ efforts to deal with online indecency and child pornography.

In 1997, the Supreme Court struck down the portion of the Communications Decency Act that barred the online transmission of indecent material but maintained the law’s provision on obscenity. The high court also has ruled against the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 measure that targeted commercial websites that make sexually explicit material available to minors.

In a limited victory for foes of online indecency, the justices upheld in 2003 the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which requires public and school libraries that receive government Internet discounts to install filters on their computers to block pornography.

The final oral arguments for this term of the Supreme Court are scheduled for April 25. The justices are expected to release the last of this term’s opinions by late June or early July.

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SPECIAL REPORT: Flood of pornography breaching the church door

HOUSTON–Back in 2000, Darrell Allen’s once-prosperous business was sputtering. Creditors and suppliers were hounding Allen and his business partners about outstanding debts. The business partners wanted to weather the storm. Allen wanted a way out.

Looking for a place to escape his mounting woes and determined creditors, he found refuge in an odd place for a former Southern Baptist minister: a strip club near his office in Houston.

“Probably the first step was needing to escape where no one would find me,” Allen recalled. “The first time I walked in there I saw this big wall with big-screen TVs, different sporting events on each one. I had a couple of drinks and got lost to the world.”

“I knew I was in a place I shouldn’t be,” Allen said. “It became easier for me to walk into that place. I’ve got a pretty outgoing personality, and pretty soon I knew the waitresses, I knew the dancers. They would invite me to lunch sometimes. It was a place where I would get away from another place that was very uncomfortable.”

Allen, 45, became a Christian in high school and served years ago on the staff of Lazybrook Baptist Church in Houston, though he said strip clubs and pornography were not part of his life during his ministry.

“It was different then,” he said. “I never went to those places.”

After the pastor of the church left for another pastorate, Allen entered the business world and made enough money for him and his wife to travel often and not worry much about bills. It seemed a good life, he said.

When that changed, “All of the sudden you’ve got a business struggling. I allowed a lot of outside pressure to build up that I didn’t address that I should have addressed.”

It became common for Allen to schedule his day around hitting the strip club; he even worked harder to have money to spend there, all the while knowing he should be home with his wife or working, he said.

He spent an entire workday at the club once, and after discovering Internet pornography, which became an addiction, he said he would escape there too–sometimes for four or five hours continuously.

“It’s amazing how much you can find on the Web without spending a penny,” said Allen, who has since lost his wife to another man after his restoration process had begun with his church. The couple had no children, though she is remarried and is pregnant with a second child with her new husband.

“I remember looking at it and imagining and fantasizing and thinking, ‘I can’t do this.’ But as the pressures mounted, I would either walk into the strip club or look at the pornography online. It was a great big rock rolling downhill. Once it started it was hard to stop.”

Meanwhile, he said he was growing estranged spiritually and emotionally from his wife, his fellow church members, his business partners, and from God. His wife was unaware of his doings, he said, because she was used to him working long days.

But what he intended as a refuge from his pressures was beginning to mount a new kind pressure in the form of guilt and estrangement from people. He began hoping he could escape by being caught.

“I started feeling empty and separated from the people who were closest to me. I remember talking to those ladies at the club about God and defending my faith, but I also was defending my reason for being there.”

Allen said he started being conspicuous with his porn and his trips to the strip club, though he was still lying often about his lifestyle.

“I was hoping my wife would go, ‘What in the world are you doing?’”

Finally, in 2003, she did, and though he said he wanted to be caught, his first response was to rationalize it. “I guess I didn’t want to admit how far I had gone.”

“We worked through that. She really worked hard to help me through that addiction and to move away from it, but I was really trying on my own power … and I fell again.”

Allen said he soon learned that with each call in Scripture to flee immorality, there is an equal call to pursue righteousness.

“I tried to stop doing what was wrong and didn’t replace it with what was right.” Allen said. “I just did the first part but I didn’t fill that void with anything spiritually—the ‘learn-to-do-what’s-right’ part.”

After failing once to overcome his temptations and begging his wife not to leave, Allen decided to call up an old friend, Robby Partain, now missions director on the staff of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, whom he had served with on the church staff years before.

“We met at a coffee shop and I simply told him, ‘Here are the things that I’ve been doing. I need help.’ He became one of the guys I could call up. One of the pastors at my church became a prayer partner with me and began contributing to my life spiritually. I quit using the computer at all for awhile. Nowadays I’ve got all kinds of blockers that prevent me from going where I don’t need to go. I really don’t surf the Web. I go to specific Internet addresses if I need to, but I don’t do random searches.”

Allen also left his business partners, spending 20 hours over several days with them as they tried to persuade him to stay.

“I needed to simplify my life and remove some of the pressures I had failed to address all along.”

He no longer has employees, tries hard not to work excessive hours, and “I try to be around people who have built me up spiritually. If you aren’t someone who has a positive spiritual influence in my life, I’m probably not going to be spending much time with you.”

In early 2006, after being separated from his wife and trying unsuccessfully to mend their marriage, Allen said his wife met someone else and soon the couple divorced.

“It was a lot of the lingering effects of what we went through. It went on too long without me providing any of those things that I needed to provide. It destroyed our marriage relationship.”

“Some of the fears of revealing this were there—my wife leaving me, my friends at the church saying we don’t want you in our lives, being ostracized—I thought all those things but I had reached such a point with the addiction that I wanted out.”

Allen said he fears the problem is more pervasive in churches than most people think, but that a fear of losing relationships keeps many men silent in their struggles.

“The people who love me and were my true friends, those relationships are closer than they’ve ever been. I have a clearer value of who I am in God’s eyes and who other people are. I love other people for who they can be in God than necessarily who they are right now. There were people who loved me and knew who I could be in God and helped me walk down that road.”

In a sex-saturated culture, Allen said each day is a struggle. “You have to quit doing what is wrong, but you have to learn to do what is right.”

Divorce lawyers are noting its increasing influence. In Great Britain, it’s blamed for the 20 percent jump in sexual assaults perpetrated by kids as young as 11.

In the United States alone, it’s a $13 billion a year business, the adult film industry says–more money than mainstream Hollywood generates.

The numbers are staggering: up to 45 million “unique” users visited adult websites in a recent month, as tracked by Nielsen Net Ratings, a March 23 news release from PR Web said.

With the advent of wireless handheld devices, porn is accessible via the mobile phone and similar devices.

“Certainly, this is going to make it easier to view porn in more places than ever,” Pamela Paul, author of “Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families,” told USA Today.

“The flood of pornography in our culture has desensitized society and has contributed to the fact that our nation is wandering aimlessly in dangerous, uncharted territory,” Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said in a statement e-mailed to the TEXAN.

That flood has entered the church doors, leaving anecdotal and documented evidence that families and churches are being damaged–mostly by Christian men, some are ministers, who succumb to what Land calls a cheap imitation of God-designed sex.

“Sexuality is a far bigger and more troubling issue in the church than any other moral issue,” Land remarked.

STAGGERING NUMBERS

The National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity reports an estimated 2 million Internet users are addicted to pornography. Christian men are among them.

In an August 2000 survey of its readership by Christianity Today magazine, 36 percent of laymen who responded had visited a sexually explicit Internet site, of which 44 percent visited such sites “a few times” in the past year.

Additionally, the six-year-old research showed that 51 percent of pastors admitted pornography was a possible temptation, 37 percent said porn is a struggle, and 33 percent had viewed Internet pornography at least once a year.

One Texas pastor who spoke to the TEXAN about the problem said the incidence of sexual immorality in the church, with pornography as the culprit, has increased in the last five years.

The pastor, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he has counseled two fellow ministry leaders regularly over the last year who have lost their ministries because of porn and related problems. One lost his marriage and the other is fighting to keep his, he said.

One was a parachurch leader whose wife discovered his addiction. “He’s doing treatment, he’s doing counseling, he’s doing accountability,” the pastor said. “He’s doing everything he can do.”

The man did not have extramarital intercourse, but “he was doing the pornography, topless bars … He spent thousands of dollars on this type of stuff. This guy was in ministry.”

The pastor estimated that “80 percent of all young ministers have at some point struggled with this on some level. Now, that may be as simple as he got sent a naked picture and he looked at it and that was the end of it. But on some level, I would say virtually every minister under the age of 30 has had some kind of experience with it in their adult lifetime.”

He added: “If you’re talking about just men in general under the age of 40, I’ll tell you it’s well above 50 percent that at least occasionally use pornography. I’m saying Christian men. Statistics show that as well.”

Henry Rogers, corporate chaplain at Dallas-based Interstate Batteries and author of the book “The Silent War: Ministering to Those Trapped in the Deception of Pornography,” told the radio program audience of ‘For Faith & Family” that porn’s proliferation is “ripping the soul out of the American male.”

Rogers said the problem is “within the church walls and not only in the pews but in the pulpit as well.”

Rogers reminded them the mind is the battlefield, noting the crucial Christian discipline of taking thoughts captive.

“We have an adversary who wants to take us out,” Rogers said. “He may wait 10, 15, 20 years. There is no age at which we can relax, thinking we are immune to sexual temptation.”

He added: “Confession is a powerful deterrent to temptation.”

HOPE FOUND IN A BOOK

Stephen Lawhon, 32, a member of Central Baptist Church in College Station and a longtime Christian believer, said he attempted to fight the temptation of pornography for years until he found hope in the simple warnings of Scripture.

Lawhon said that even though he grew up in a Christian family, his occasional encounter with por as a kid led to a problem that he recognized as early as age 15.

“I started seeing porn at 11 or 12 years old. There would be a dirty magazine outside somebody’s house. It just escalated from there. I always had an unquenchable thirst for it.”

All the while, he was a leader in his youth group. He even recalled talking to his youth minister once about it.

“He prayed with me and patted me on the back and said, ‘Hey, it’s going to be alright. That was it. And that’s not a slam on him. We just didn’t know what to do with this back then. We just didn’t talk about that stuff,” Lawhon said.

In college at Texas A&M, Lawhon said he joined Central and was in college ministry leadership there, though he still battled pornography.

“I was leading this double life. I had this secret compartment tucked away. When it really took off for me was when it became available online. I would never get caught dead buying pornography. But I would download it in my room. It scares me to think where I’d be now if I had the access that kids and men have today,” he said.

He once got rid of his external computer modem, then he got rid of his computer altogether. But his compulsion led him to the school computer lab, where he’d download porn on floppy disks, he said.

After meeting his future wife, he told her he had struggled with pornography, but he said she underestimated the problem. He thought that once he was married he would no longer desire pornography, but he was wrong, he said.

“The pastor who married us told us whatever problems we bring into our marriage would be magnified in the marriage. He was right, and I nearly lost my marriage over it.”

Lawhon said he bought book after book on the subject, but, “It wasn’t until I picked up the Bible that he really showed me he wrote the book thousands of years ago on this subject. It wasn’t until I was truly broken that I started climbing out of it.”

Lawhon said he has found hope and strength from his church family, his wife, and more than any other resource, the Bible, particularly Proverbs 7 and the warning about the harlot who lurks on every corner.

He said King David was in the wrong place when he lusted after Bathsheeba and committed adultery with her, while Joseph faced his temptation with Potiphar’s wife while tending to his responsibilities. Lawhon said that through the lens of Proverbs 7, one can see that Joseph had an advantage because he was where he was supposed to be while David, who should have been at war, wasn’t.

“The Bible talks about how we will not be tempted beyond what we are able to endure, and when we’re tempted God will provide a way out. What does that mean? What does that look like in real life? The Holy Spirit is huge in overcoming this. The Holy Spirit will bring accountability in my life. When I feel temptation coming on, I start to drift where I’m not supposed to drift … and the phone will ring and it’s a friend from church,” Lawhon said.

“My point is, the Holy Spirit brings accountability into our lives. And when that way out presents itself, I have to make a choice to walk that way out.”

Instead of offering “burnt offerings” by going to Promise Keepers or reading a book or attending another conference, Lawhon said he realized “I was choosing pornography over what God had for my life. I wasn’t living in the grace of Jesus Christ.”

Lawhon spends much of his time working with college students, many of whom are struggling through many of the battles he went through.

He advises them to continually renew their minds by memorizing Scripture and dealing with only one day at a time, because overcoming sexual temptation is fought one battle at a time.

“I used to rationalize my discouragement by saying, ‘I’m gonna mess up tomorrow. I might as well mess up today.’ The Lord told me, ‘No, you deal with today, Stephen. I’ll deal with tomorrow.’”

“It’s a struggle today. We fight an enemy that has nothing to do.”

Also, the stigma of pornography is greater than alcohol or drug abuse, Lawhon said, which makes coming forward more difficult.

The SBC’s Land said in a 2002 radio interview: “You can go to your Sunday School class and say you have a real problem with alcohol and ask the class to pray for you, but if you go to your Sunday School class and say you need prayer for a problem with pornography, it would be like you set off a stink bomb in the room.”

RIPPLES IN THE KINGDOM

The pastor the TEXAN interviewed said one of the ministers he is counseling is “going to do everything he can to recover. He turned himself in [to his ministry], started the counseling process, started the accountability, did a contract with his wife and with me and with some other guys.”

But even with accountability, vital as it is, “both you and I know that people can lie,” he said. “In fact, one of these guys I used to meet with, he did lie to me for a while. When all this started, when he actually was doing some of this stuff, he was lying to me.”

The man later initiated a meeting and confessed that he had lied.

“There’s no guarantee that goes with accountability. And we’re naïve to think that just because somebody sits down and asks the questions that we are always getting the truth. But at the same time, I think it’s something important. I think it’s something you need to do. It’s a process you need to be experiencing, though it’s certainly no guarantee.”

The pastor said it is crucial that a minister allows friends, staff and fellow church members to inspect the cache of his computer anytime to see what sites he has visited.

The pastor said the ravages of pornography and sexual sin among believers has a ripple effect.

“Particularly when it’s someone in ministry. It affects that pastor. It affects his spouse, his family, his children if he has any. It affects his children’s friends. It affects his congregation. It affects his immediate family, cousins, It affects his neighbors. It degrades the image of Christ for those who are lost and those in the community who look to that church and those who are considering the claims of the gospel, those who have just come to know Christ.

“It’s enormous when you stop and think about the negative consequences of falling into the trap. Quite frankly, at least half the time they end up losing their family. And nobody thinks that way. Nobody thinks when they first start looking at porn that ‘I’m going to lose my family. I’m going to lose my job.’”

“Both of the guys I’m dealing with right now, here’s what they’ve lost: they’ve lost their marriage. They’ve lost their job. They lost a lot of friends in the sense it will never be the same. They’ve lost custody of their children and now they are both doing something that they don’t really want to do or feel called to do, and they’re just trying to get by.”