Anti-Porn Billboards Across America

The adult industry has certainly peppered the American landscape with come-hither billboards, as they know well in Hartford, but apparently the other side has put up a few as well, a tiny step to balance a badly distorted national discourse. Here’s a quick tour:

Anti-Porn Billboards Pop Up Around Jacksonville on Valentine’s Day
Billboards around the city are urging people to stop looking at pornography in the name of love.

The messages showed on up on five of the daily billboards that are located all around Jacksonville.

The billboards have an anti-porn message–“Her gift for Valentine’s Day–stop looking at porn. XXXChurch.com”

The message is expected to be on the billboard for Valentine’s Day only…

“It’s just to tell guys, especially, not to have the make-believe relationships with porn stars, but to concentrate on their marriages and their relationships with their loved ones,” [founder of the Web site XXXChurch.com Craig] Gross said…

Besides the five billboards in Jacksonville, organizers posted two signs in Michigan and one in New York.

The Salt Lake Tribune: “Students compete to draw attention to the damage of addiction to porn”
Fighting pornography has earned Danny Hy a ticket to the billboard big time.

The Alta High School junior not only won first place and a $500 scholarship in the “Battle for the Billboard” competition, but his anti-smut-themed creation will grace a space alongside Interstate 15 for one month this summer.

When the billboard company YESCO erects Hy’s display, motorists may first laugh, and then think about the damage obsession with pornography can cause. Hy’s billboard will show a man kissing his computer screen; behind him will be two crying children.

The message thousands will glimpse? “Porn doesn’t affect just you, it affects the whole family.”

Ape Culture, “The Mother of All Road Trips”
After spending two days visiting family and friends in St. Louis, we
headed West. Driving through Missouri on Interstate 44, we passed many
billboards for Meramec Caverns–one of many reputed hideouts of Jesse
James. We also noticed that every adult video store had a huge
anti-porn billboard next to it with slogans like “Porn Destroys
Families”…

The Washington Post: Abilene
The Lion’s Den, a chain of more than two dozen [porn shops], has targeted rural America on account of the cheap leases, lax ordinances and under-titillated population.

When workmen appeared at the site a little over a year ago, Bruce Owen was told that the new store would be selling cowboy boots. Then, one Sunday morning in fall 2003, the Owens awakened to see the word ADULT hovering, floodlit, outside their back window.

A retired military man in Abilene, Philip Cosby, organized a protest. For 100 days, around the clock, through frozen winds and slushy storms, Bruce, Donna and some of their neighbors waved signs outside the Lion’s Den…

Cosby said the community raised $5,000 in one day to put up the anti-porn billboard…

The Owens disclosed this story cautiously, because they had no confidence that we would report it honestly. “We watch the news,” Bruce said. “It seems like they think they know everything. They look down on us.”

“They seem arrogant and above it all,” Donna added.

“We aren’t all hicks out here,” Bruce continued. “I was national service manager for AT&T. For that matter: You try running a farm out here these days. One combine can cost as much as a house. My son runs a multimillion-dollar farm.”

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