The Progressives Push Porn on Kids & Politicians' Faux Religion ｜ Matt Fradd
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Summary
Matt Fradd joins me on The Michael Knowles Show to talk about why Joe Biden should repent for his support of abortion, and why he should be refused Holy Communion at Mass. He also talks about why Catholics should be able to disagree with the Church on some matters, but not others.
Transcript
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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There are many devout Catholics in our national political landscape these days. I'm thinking,
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of course, of people like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi. Now, they might not agree with the
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teachings of Holy Mother Church. They might not believe the central tenets of Christianity,
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or at least very important tenets of it. They might not practice their faith,
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but they are devout nonetheless because words have no meaning anymore. Well, fortunately,
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I am joined by a very serious practicing Catholic. Now, one of my favorite people out there
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in the Catholic media landscape, very sharp fella by the name of Matt Fradd. Matt Fradd is the creator
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and host of Pints with Aquinas. He's also the author of How to Be Happy, St. Thomas's Secret to a Good
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Life. Also, Does God Exist, a Socratic Dialogue on the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas, and he's got lots
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of other wonderful commentary out there. Matt, thank you for joining me. It's great to be on.
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Thanks for having me. So, you on, I think, some pretty important issues would probably diverge
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from, say, a Joe Biden or a Nancy Pelosi. And yet, I'm to understand you're both devout Catholics. So,
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can you help me wrap my head around what these words mean?
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Yeah, it's difficult. I think a faithful Catholic should submit to what the church teaches
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authoritatively, but also not demand uniformity where the church allows diversity of opinion or
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custom. So, I think you can fall off on the left and you can fall off on the right as far as being
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a faithful Catholic. I try to be a faithful Catholic. I try to repent when I'm not. But Joe Biden promotes
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and celebrates the slaughtering of the unborn. And I know that people might be tired of hearing that,
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but I imagine if the unborn could be tired of being slaughtered, that would outrank your concern.
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So, yeah, it's disgusting. Not to mention his promotion of children being able to, say,
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castrate themselves or getting a double mastectomy. He seems ambivalent on that topic.
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Like, so, yeah, he should repent before Almighty God. And look, I've done some kind of soul searching
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on this. And I've thought to myself, what would I rather, Joe Biden repent or be refused Holy
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Communion at Mass and be super embarrassed? And to my shame, sometimes it's the latter.
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You know, really, as a Catholic, what I ought to be doing is praying for him and his conversion.
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But of course, you know, keeping someone from receiving Holy Communion, refusing to give them
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the Eucharist, is an act toward repentance. I mean, that is the point. It's not just to make
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someone feel bad about himself. It's to stir and promote repentance because it's not just
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the private sin of his support for abortion. It's the public sin. I mean, it's the scandal as well.
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And it's a real scandal. Joe Biden is nominally the second Catholic president. And yet he is so,
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so out of step with the church's teaching here. I'm also really glad that you brought up this issue
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of being able to disagree on certain matters, but not others. You know, it's not all just a
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blanket, five bullet points on a napkin. Here's what you've got to believe. For instance, on the
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issue of the death penalty, though, especially modern popes have been quite opposed to the death
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penalty. Pope Benedict put it very well when he said that Catholics may reasonably disagree on the
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practice of the death penalty. And it's a complex issue. Obviously, some popes have carried out the
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death penalty. I'm thinking of blessed Pope Pius IX. And yet other popes are vociferously opposed
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to it. St. Paul defends the death penalty. Other writers in the Catholic Church have been opposed to
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it. And so we can have a reasonable disagreement here. Even Pope Francis, who's so, so against the
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death penalty, he stopped short of calling it intrinsically evil because he could not do that
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because it's defended even in the Bible. On an issue like abortion, that's just not the case.
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The church's teaching on abortion goes back to the didache. It goes back to the second century,
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at least, and if not even further back. So there just seem to be some lines in the sand that are
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getting much, much blurrier, at least in the political sphere. Yeah. If it's not atrociously
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wrong for big, strong people to kill little weak people, I'm not sure what atrocious or wrong would
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mean at that point. So yeah. And it's important to point out, too, that this is not just a matter of us,
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as you say, making Biden feel bad. In the code of canon law, canon 915, it says that those who are
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obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin should not receive, should not be permitted to receive
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Holy Communion. And to my fellow Catholics out there who disagree with that, I would ask them this.
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Suppose Donald Trump was in office and Donald Trump converted to Catholicism. I'm pretty sure you
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would say that he should not receive Holy Communion because you think he's a sexist or a racist or
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something else. But of course, as awful as being a racist or these sorts of things, it's actually far
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worse to slaughter innocent human beings. Of course, there's no real comparison here. And I think very
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often, you know, the left, it is the left that's doing it. I understand there are extremists on the
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right, too, but it's the left that is really calling for this inversion of standards and this
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bizarre view of vice and virtue. And I'm reminded, I don't want to beat up on the reporter too much,
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but there was a journalist who very quickly deleted the tweet. So I've gone light on her.
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But she tweeted out that we need porn for children because, here's her argument, and I mean, it has a
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kind of perverse logic to it. She's saying that kids are accessing porn. We know that they're
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accessing porn. I think the average age is something like 11, you know, and some kids are accessing it
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even at a younger age. And the porn is vile and extraordinarily perverted and violent very often.
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And so her argument is, since kids are going to be exposed to porn, we should have a sort of nicer
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porn, you know, where they're not quite so violent and they're not, it's sort of a little bit more
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gentle or something like that. It didn't go over very well and she deleted this. But I suspect a lot
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of people hold to this kind of bizarre view. Yeah, I'm of the opinion that pornography,
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say consuming pornography, the distribution of it, the production of it is intrinsically evil,
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which is just to say it's not evil because of the intentions of those viewing it, say,
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nor is it evil merely because of the consequences of viewing it. I think it's just wrong in and of
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itself. So I would say under no circumstances should people consume pornography. But I think we could
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agree that some things are less bad than others, right? So it would be less bad to view pornography
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that was not violent and terribly degraded than to view, you know, rape porn. But just because
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something is less bad than something else, it doesn't make it healthy or good. If I say I only smoke one
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carton of cigarettes a day, not five, well, that's better, but it's not good.
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Not healthy. And yeah. And over the last 40 years, there's been a lot of studies that have come out
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of academia from different branches of science, like neurology, sociology, and psychology. And
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all of it is saying unambiguously that porn is detrimental to the health, the emotional health,
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even the sexual health of the consumer, our relationships and society as a whole.
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So just a couple real quick. There are over 70 studies that show a correlation between porn use
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and sexual dissatisfaction. So there you go. According to science, if you'd like to remain
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sexually frustrated, porn's the ticket. There are 56 neuroscience-based studies on porn users.
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All but one lends strong support for the addiction model. Just one more. We have 40 studies that show a
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correlation between porn use and sexual dysfunction, like premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction.
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12 of those 40 studies show not just correlation, but causation. Since in these studies, the one
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factor of pornography was removed and the subjects regained their sexual functioning. So we've got
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really good reason for thinking that pornography is bad for us. And so introducing it to children is a
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I think also, I agree with your view on porn, and I know that some people are trying to make everything
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relative. They want to deny that anything is absolutely evil, other than perhaps Donald Trump.
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He might be the incarnation of evil. Everything else is on a relative scale. But I think what it also
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gets to is an error in the way that the human mind works and the human soul works. I think for a very
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long time, at least since Freud, we've been operating under the steam engine model of the mind and the soul.
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Namely, we've got all this pent-up sexual energy, and teenagers are certainly going to have lots of
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pent-up sexual energy. And so they've just got to blow off a little steam. And all of us, we all just
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need to blow off a little steam, whether that means doing some drug or overindulging in drink or
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looking at some porn. Look, if you just blow off a little steam, then it's going to make you
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ultimately healthier and balance you out so you don't explode. But this would seem to contrast with,
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oh, I don't know, old Uncle Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas, who recognized that virtue is a habit,
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right? Virtue is a practice. And I think we all know this in our own lives, whether it's going on a
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diet or whether it's exercising or abstaining from something that is harmful to us. The more that we
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practice a virtue, the easier it becomes. And the more that we practice a vice, whether it's drug addiction
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or porn or whatever, the more we practice that, the easier that becomes as well. And those
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two views of how the mind works, they're completely at odds with one another.
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Yeah, exactly. No, if it were the case that pornography merely relieved your sexual desires,
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then people who watch pornography ought to be sort of sexually carefree in the sense of satisfied.
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But that isn't what we see happen. What we see is the more you consume it, the more you desire to
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consume it. You build up a tolerance, what you have already seen, and then feel the need to view more
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deviant forms of pornography and to view more of it. So actually, I was struck by an analogy recently.
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It was by Norman Doidge, who wrote the bestselling book, The Brain That Changes Itself. And to your
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point of habits and vices, the more we're learning about the brain and say neural pathways in the
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brain, he has this great analogy. He says, suppose you find yourself in a forest, you have two paths
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ahead of you. One path represents looking at pornography, the other path represents abstaining.
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If you keep going down the path to look at pornography and have been doing that since you
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were eight, that path will be very well worn. The other will be overgrown and more difficult
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to walk down. But as you say, with time, with habit, if you choose to break free from pornography
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by getting good books, good accountability, good software, that this will begin to be easier
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to walk down. I know that from my own experience, whereas the path to look at pornography, you don't
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just slide into it as you once did. And that's really good news for those struggles.
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Well, that's right. I mean, mentioning your own experience, you're one of the few people
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who have come out and said, look, I dealt with this problem. This is a problem that I've seen
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one study that said it afflicts 91 or 93% of men. And the caveat to that study is that seven
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or 9% of men are liars. You know, I've really, you see it throughout the culture, especially
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for young men. And you said, I've dealt with this. It's an embarrassing problem, but there is
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a way out of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I honestly, I was, maybe it was a grace from God. I was never
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terribly embarrassed to share about it, maybe because I encountered so many other people who
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said, I struggle, but nobody knows. Pornography feels good. I'm still tempted to it from time to
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time. If I have a couple of drinks or if I'm very stressed out, these sorts of things, I think
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pornography and masturbation become for many a sort of pacifier to regulate our emotional turbulence.
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We turn to it when we're upset or bored or feel invisible or unsuccessful or emasculated or
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something like that. Um, but it, uh, doesn't give us what it promises. You know, we, we might go for
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excitement. We end up bored. We might go for, uh, you know, uh, adult entertainment and become
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increasingly juvenile. It just, it just, it doesn't just not give us what it promises. It kind of gives
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the opposite. Um, so it's entirely unsatisfying. Um, so that's why I love speaking to men and women
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who are hooked on this and say, Hey, look, you're a lovely person, I'm sure. Or if you're not, you
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ought to be, and you desire to be, and you don't need to let porn stand in your way, you know? So.
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And compared to other temptations and vices, this is the one that is ubiquitous. You can do it
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entirely, almost entirely in the privacy of your own, uh, you know, darkest closet, though it's not
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totally private because big tech is looking at you and, you know, there are records of these things.
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Uh, but, uh, you know, it's not spoken of. And when it is spoken of, it's spoken of positively
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so much so that people say that kids should have good porn. And I, I love the point that you're
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making here on satisfaction because of course, yes, like all sin and vice, it promises you one
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thing and it gives you the opposite. And this especially so, uh, but people are historically
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dissatisfied. You're, you're seeing the average life expectancy in the United States dropping,
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not because of the Wuhan virus. I mean, perhaps then too, but, but this was happening for years
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now. It's dropping because of deaths of despair, because of drug addiction, because of suicide.
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You've seen huge spike in suicide actually in some quarters during the lockdowns. So people are
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unhappy. You look even, you measure the happiness of women since the women's movement in the middle
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of the 20th century. What happened? Women's happiness, if you can measure it, has declined both
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in relative terms to men, but also in absolute terms. So everyone's unhappy. No one's having
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kids. You know, we've got a very, very low birth rate now. We've got the life expectancy declining.
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So Matt, I need the answer. And you know, the five or six minutes we got,
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what is the secret to a good life? How does, how does one have a good life?
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Well, first of all, let me say something about pornography and I'll get into the good life
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through it. The problem with pornography, it's been said, isn't that it shows too much,
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but that it shows too little, right? It reduces the beauty and mystery of sex and femininity
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and masculinity to a sort of two-dimensional thing for my consumption. So I'm against porn
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because I'm pro-sex, not because I'm anti-sex and because I would like a beautiful, fulfilling sex
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life in my marriage. And I think people should want that if they're married and that porn only
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gets in the way of that. Yeah. So I just wrote a book called How to Be Happy, St. Thomas's Secret
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to a Good Life. Thomas Aquinas, people often think of him, they might think of metaphysics or his
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arguments for God's existence or just war theory or these sorts of things. But he had a lot to say
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about human flourishing. And he follows Aristotle in that sense, where he understands happiness
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to be a sort of an excellence of human beings. And he distinguishes between two types of happiness.
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He calls one beatitude, one felicitous. That's the Latin of the Greek Aristotle used. Namely,
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what he's saying is to be perfectly happy will not happen in this life, but we can have a high degree
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of happiness through virtue in this life. So if you want any chance of being happy,
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you have to grow in virtue, flee from vice. But since we've been made ultimately for God,
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Thomas Aquinas would say, we will not be fully satisfied until we behold him, as it were,
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face to face in heaven. Aquinas even goes through a list of the certain things we turn to to make
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us happy, like honor and physical pleasure and even spiritual pleasure, money and these sorts of
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things. And he shows, he doesn't just say, can't make you happy. He offers arguments for why they can't
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make us happy. And I find myself really convicted by it. So yeah, it's neat. I think for too long,
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we've thought about morality as thou shalt not, right? Don't do what you really want to do.
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But actually morality is about how to be happy. Like how do I live a life of human flourishing?
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And that's how Thomas understands it, how Aristotle understands it. And that's what I try to put in this.
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You know, I just read a book, very old book, about 500 years old by Dom Lorenzo Scupoli called
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The Spiritual Combat. And in it, he lays something out that I know a lot of people are grappling with.
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And he just lays it out so simply and so clearly. It's sort of what St. Paul's getting at when he
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says, the things I want to do, I don't do. And the things that I don't want to do, I do. And you
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think, well, how on earth does that make any sense? And yet we all know that that is true. And what
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Scupoli points out is we have a lower will. We have certain desires, but they're base desires,
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they're appetites. You know, it's the appetite for the addiction. It's the appetite for
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more, more, more food, more cigarettes, more whatever. Then we have the higher will. That's
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a rational will. So we can be conscious of that. We can, we recognize that there's some objective
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standard that we're trying to come into line with. And the rational will mediates between
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the appetites, which every animal has, and the divine will, which is perfect and right and just.
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And so the whole process, it's so funny how much we forget in our society, because the whole process
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of a liberal education was once understood to be getting that base will to come into alignment with
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the rational will so that you can actually be a free person. Not free in the sense that you've got
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an iPhone and you can go look at porn, or you've got a syringe and you can shoot up, but free in the
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sense that you can master those appetites and really pursue what you ultimately desire.
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Yeah. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, under chastity, it has this wonderful line,
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probably my favorite in the whole Catechism. It says, the alternative is clear. Either man governs
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his passions and so finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy.
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You see this in Dante, probably the most famous canto of Dante's, Paolo and Francesca,
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these adulterous lovers. And their punishment is that they are whipped around on winds. They can't,
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they can never control. They're just going to be brought along on the winds and the gusts of lust
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and passion. That's exactly right. So it is counterintuitive. Sometimes we think, or perhaps
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we've been told that if I just engage my passions without restraint, that's the path to happiness.
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But it seems to me that you only have to live to the age of 14 to realize that that doesn't work.
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And so, yeah, maybe try a different route. What are you seeing happening? I actually have a bit of
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hope here, not only because it's a demand and a theological virtue, but I actually think things,
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might be improving in as much as for a long time, at least in the United States,
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the conservative movement adopted this, you do you kind of approach to politics.
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Oh yeah, we're the cool party. We're the free party. Yeah, look, whatever, look at porn or
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do drugs. Or there was a famous essay by P.G. O'Rourke, who's a conservative humorist,
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which was called the Republican Party Reptile, how to drive fast on drugs while getting your wing
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wang squeezed and not spill your drink. And it, you know, it sort of embodied that 1980s,
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90s vision of what it means to be a conservative. And I'm noticing now the people who still embrace
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that thing, do whatever you want, just don't make me pay for it. It's kind of the boomers,
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you know, it's kind of this older Gen X, it's kind of this older crowd on the right. And the
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younger crowd, the youths that they think that they're appealing to, that I've spoken to Gen Z
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and even millennials, they don't want that. They actually do want some moral order. They do want
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some standards and they do want to pursue virtue. Are you seeing that as well? Or am I,
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am I just hallucinating? No, I'm, yeah, no, I'm seeing that as well. It feels like for so long,
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people who've been more conservative have tried these sort of incremental approach. And I'm not
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poo-pooing that. I see that there's a, there's a reason for that, but almost like, well, I don't
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want to come off as too radical. So yeah, maybe abortion except for rape and incest and, um, or sorry,
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just rape and incest, but no other reason. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, but, um, it seems like more and more,
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it's like, no, uh, we need to speak the truth and speak it clearly. There is a way to live.
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There is a way not to live. And if society and culture becomes poisoned with intrinsically evils,
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the fruit, the children, the families out of that are going to be dysfunctional and unhappy as well.
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So it seems to me that we have an obligation to, for the common good and that we should act in such
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a way and even legislate in such a way to bring that about. Of course, a Republic refers to the
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things we hold in common, the public things. I mean, there's no, we have a constitution to promote
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the general welfare. We do live in a society. We're not just atoms floating around in the world,
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born purely with rights. We have obligations. We're in a family, in a community. We want to
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live in a nice place and we want to have a nice country. And one of the people helping to guide
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us back there, I think is Matt Fradd. And I would recommend that everyone go get the book,
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How to Be Happy, St. Thomas's Secret to a Good Life. And really, and follow Matt's other stuff too.
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I think you write so clearly, you write so clearly, you speak so clearly, you've got a lot of moral
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courage, you know, even to talk about very difficult issues that a lot of people don't want to talk
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about that is just pervading our society. And I think just that simplicity, that clarity is really
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a way to snap people out of it. I often go back to Ernest Hemingway's description of bankruptcy
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as a thing that happens gradually and then suddenly. And, you know, things can happen suddenly.
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There can be big shifts. We might be in one of those shifts right now. And I hope we have a good
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life and human flourishing for our whole country. Matt, thanks for being on the show.