Notes from around the web

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 14, 2016 | In Quick Hits

• In a fine piece appearing on the National Review site, David French makes roughly the same argument that I’ve made here recently: that the latest battles in the culture wars involve not only marriage and family, but the right to speak the truth—or worse, the compulsion to accept a lie. French puts it succinctly:

  If a pro-life American can be required to facilitate abortion access, or if a person can be required to lie to avoid offending the so-called transgendered, then the “fixed star” in our constitutional constellation will no longer reside in a robust First Amendment. Only America’s most intolerant cultural revolutionaries and their enabling judges will know where to find it.



• Here’s one of the more depressing statistics you’re likely to encounter. The world’s largest internet porn site reports that its viewers spent nearly 4.4 billion hours on the site in 2015. That’s the equivalent of roughly a half-million men watching porn constantly, 24/7, for the entire year, or 500,000 years spent viewing porn—on just one site! To look at it another way, the construction of the Empire State building required about 7 million man-hours of labor; last year, about 600 times that number of man-hours were spent on this one porn site. The sheer waste of time alone would be tragic, even if there weren’t souls being wasted as well.