Just reading the headlines is enough to make you feel numb.

Scan the “news feed” at familyfragments.com, and you’ll see what I mean:

“Man Admits He Had Child Pornography” … “Child Sex Tourism Raises Its Head in India” … “Two Men Sentenced for Running International Pornography Business” … “Judge Sentences Porn Spammers to 5+ Years” … “Mom Awarded $85,000 for Daughters’ Exposure to Motel Porn” … “Police Arrest Man Accused of Raping Little Girl on Videotape.”

That’s only a fraction of them, I’m afraid.

The subject matter of these articles alone -- even without the grotesque details -- is enough to churn your stomach and make you want to turn away in disgust.

But we can’t turn our backs on the fact that pornography -- photographic records of the abhorrent deeds described above -- is a monumental, pervasive problem in our modern, over-sexualized culture. We must fight back against the purveyors of smut -- and help the casual consumer understand that consumption of this vile material harms individuals and society as a whole. It’s a task that motivates many good pro-family groups -- groups that fight against a multi-billion-dollar industry that has successfully seduced a nation into buying and selling human flesh.

One wonderful group is the Lighted Candle Society, which runs familyfragments.com. Lighted Candle doesn’t simply collect news links. Its mission is to fight the producers and distributors of pornography and to finance scientific research into the addictive nature of porn. The group relies on the ground-breaking research of Dr. Judith Reisman, author of “Kinsey, Sex and Fraud.” And its trustees include a colleague of mine whose name you may recognize: Edwin Meese III.

It’s been 21 years since General Meese spearheaded the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography and released a landmark report on the harms of pornography. Anyone who thinks that porn is, generally speaking, nothing more than harmless fun should read through the “Victimization” chapter of the Meese Report. It’s absolutely chilling. The trail of broken homes and broken hearts that the porn industry has left in its wake is astounding. (More recent stories appear on another Lighted Candle site, herstorylives.com.)

Dr. Reisman’s research “reveals that frequent use of pornography creates addiction and … damage in the structure and the function of the brain,” notes John Harmer, chairman of the Lighted Candle Society, who dedicates his book “The Sex Industrial Complex” to Reisman. “Through the use of fMRI’s (functional magnetic resonance imaging), we can now watch the human brain react to the stimuli of violence and pornography.” Continued...