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Volume 52, Issue 35 | wednesday, october 25, 2017 | ndsmcobserver.com
Panel discusses pornography Former porn star, user share stories for White Ribbon Against Pornography Week By ALEXANDRA MUCK News Writer
Former pornography star Crissy Moran said that for her, working in the industry was “very much acting and pretending that you love it.” “To me, I liked … the glamorous part of it and that they were doing my hair and my makeup and that people wanted to see the pictures, but the part that was a struggle for me was when it would go past the point of having to take clothes off,” she said. Moran spoke on her experiences in “Porn — On Both Sides of the Screen,” a panel sponsored by the McGrath Institute for Church Life and Students for Child-Oriented Policy on Tuesday night. The event — which was part of White Ribbon Against Pornography (WRAP) Week — also featured Traylor Lovvorn, a former pornography addict, and his wife Melody Lovvorn. Leonard DeLorenzo, a theology
professor and director for Notre Dame Vision at the McGrath Institute for Church Life, moderated the panel and said he wanted the panel to focus on the stories, not the numbers, of pornography. “When we talk about statistics, we don’t see these people. The sheer volume of it all drowns out their voices,” he said. “… What we want to do tonight is focus not on a topic, actually, but on stories — stories from people, people who come from both sides of that screen where pornography is projected.” Moran discussed her childhood, which included being molested for the first time at the age of four. Moran said when she started dating at 17, she became sexually active, but her boyfriend took her to get an abortion when she became pregnant. After they broke up, Moran said she went from boyfriend to boyfriend. “I felt like in order to feel loved,
Observer Staff Report
KATHRYNE ROBINSON | The Observer
Crissy Moran, left, and Traylor Lovvorn speak about their experiences see WRAP PAGE 3 with pornography and the industry at a panel discussion Tuesday.
Professor explores growth of secularism in country By KARA MIECZNIKOWSKI News Writer
NDVotes hosted this semester’s first installment of Pizza, Pop and Politics on Tuesday night, exploring the political causes and consequences of the rapid increase of non-religion and secularism in the United States. The discussion was led by David Campbell, a professor of American democracy and chairperson of the political science department at Notre Dame. Campbell began by giving a brief background on the research he conducted alongside professor Geoffrey Layman, a political science professor at Notre Dame and professor John Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron. As a general trend, wealth leads to secularization within a country, Campbell said. Compared to other economically developed nations, the United States is much
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more religious, and that has long been the case, he added. “The United States has always been known as the great exception to secularization,” Campbell said. “But over the last 25 years, we have seen what has become known as the rise of the ‘nones.’” The term “nones,” according to Campbell, refers to the group of people that, when asked their religious preference on surveys, don’t answer as Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or another religion; they answer “none.” From 1972 to 1992, the percentage of Americans saying they had no religion or no religious affiliation was quite low, at somewhere between 5 and 8 percent, Campbell said. Around the early 1990s, this began to change, and there has been a sharp increase in non-religion since. Campbell said 22-23 percent of Americans today fall into this category, which is now competing with Evangelical Protestantism for the position of largest “religious
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group” in the U.S. Campbell’s research examines the possible political causes and consequences of America’s secular turn by asking two questions: What accounts for the rapid increase in non-religion? And what are the consequences of growing non-religion and secularism for American political life? Politics — particularly the growing associations in the U.S. between religion and the Republican conservative — may be partially responsible for increasing secularism in the United States, Campbell said. “Over the last three or four decades, as the so-called ‘religious right’ has emerged and mobilized conservative Evangelical Protestants into politics and has become increasingly influential within the Republican party — and the Republican coalition has become increasingly see SECULARISM PAGE 3
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The University will receive an unrestricted gift of $100 million from an alumnus after his death, according to a Tuesday CNBC report. The report said 1978 Notre Dame graduate Kenneth Ricci has promised the donation to the University in order to “set aside some money for his family and their foundation while also resolving the transfer of ownership in his business after his death” if his three kids do not want to take over any of the businesses. A member of the Air Force ROTC and Band of the Fighting Irish during his time at Notre Dame and a current member of the Board of Trustees, Ricci said see GIFT PAGE 3
Nun lectures on gender dignity By SOFIA MADDEN News Writer
Sr. Mary Prudence Allen discussed the dignity of human gender at the sixth annual Human Dignity Lecture on Tuesday night. In the talk, she mapped out the history of gender constructions throughout time, beginning with ancient Greek philosophy and developing to notions of gender in the 20th and 21st centuries. She first identified the four elements in the concept of women, which was introduced in 384 B.C. as a part of Plato and Aristotle’s studies. “The four elements across which gender theories center include opposites, generation, wisdom and virtue,” Allen said. She said Plato was the first philosopher to acknowledge all four of these elements in discussing gender relations. He first initiated a philosophical understanding of gender with his “unisex theory,”
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which proposed that men and women have no significant differences and are therefore equal in dignity. Aristotle, contrasting Plato, believed males to be naturally superior to females across all four of the gender concept categories — opposites, generation, wisdom and virtue — Allen said. “Aristotle’s ‘sex polarity theory’ drastically opposed Plato’s foundations of thought,” she said. Allen argued that while Aristotle was an empiricist, he did not possess a scientific understanding of the male and female bodies. “Aristotle didn’t understand female ovulation, and therefore speculated that males provided the seeds of life, while women merely represented the material for life to grow,” she said. Aristotle believed women to be defective forms of men, whose irrational powers could not be see GENDER PAGE 3
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