The Red State Porn Study

This must be giving some on the left mega-tingles:

Porn in the USA: Conservatives Are Biggest Consumers

That's how ABC News described a new porn study done by a guy named Benjamin Edelman of Harvard Business School. Explaining further, they tell us that while porn is popular all over,

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

Perfect mental image--repressed hypocritical gun clinging hillbillies waving the Bible on Sunday and railing against homos then ringing up the smut line on Monday. Another fat softball into Barney Frank's wheelhouse.

Is there hypocrisy? Yeah, anywhere humans exist. But data is data. Wild accusatory headlines need at least some basis in fact, something seemingly lacking here:

That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer's postal code.

In other words interesting but relatively meaningless politically. A zip code obviously doesn't prove whether the porn addict is a red or blue voter, even if there was a disproportionate level of red to blue voters in any zip. But why let facts stop giant leaps when damage can be done? Here's ABC:

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

Then Edelman:

"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.

Nonsense, there's no way of knowing that without knowing the names of the porn users and who they voted for. But this is really about solidifying liberal orthodoxy by tearing down Democratic opposition (which now apparently includes charities) so it doesn't matter. It's about doing whatever it takes to clear the path towards universal health care, gay marriage, aborted fetuses for research, and blindness towards existential threats, just as it was during the previous administration.