“I Am Not a Monster”—Ariel Castro as Sinner and Sociopath

“I am not a monster. I am a normal person. I am just sick.”  Those were among the words Ariel Castro addressed to an Ohio judge as he faced the bar of justice yesterday. Shortly thereafter, Judge Michael J. Russo of the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court sentenced Castro to life in prison with no chance of parole, and then added an additional 1,000 years of prison time.

Castro, age 53, had kept three women imprisoned in his Cleveland home for a decade, treating them as sex slaves. All of the women were young when Castro abducted them; two were teenagers. He entered a guilty plea yesterday in order to avoid the death penalty. He eventually pleaded guilty to more than 900 criminal counts, including aggravated murder, rape, and kidnapping, among other crimes. The aggravated murder count was tied to Castro’s brutal beating of one woman when she was pregnant with his child. The unborn child died and the woman miscarried.    Continue at Al Mohler

Men Like to Look At Naked Girls On The Internet. Here’s Why They Should Stop That.

I had a bit of a personal crisis when I saw this link from The Huffington Post titled, “Research Suggests that All Men Watch Pornography.” My first thought was that they could not have possibly talked to all men. I know this, because I do not watch pornography. This made me suspicious that the link was tied to a pornographic Web site designed to trick me, the last man standing, into accidentally seeing pornography in order to validate their research. (Or, more disturbingly, it could be that I am not actually a man because I do not watch pornography.)

Do not mistake my assertion for some kind of moral high ground. I have seen pornographic images before, and my mind is fairly full of sexual imagery that I have stored from various fantasies; I don’t really need pornography to qualify as a pervert. I do not think that this makes me abnormal, as the sexual drive is a gift from God. It’s just that I believe pursuing pornographic fantasy is like driving a car at high speed down the wrong lane.

I discovered that the title of the article was a bit misleading, as it suggests that all men currently watch porn. In fact, the research documented that they could not find any man who hadn’t seen it before. And that I can believe. It is possible that there is not a man in the United States over the age of 20 who has never seen pornography.    Continue at Brad Williams