A writer for one of the world’s largest Christian websites pseudonymously writes a column exposing her 10-year old son’s searches for gay porn, tells him homosexuality is not “real sexuality.”
A Christian writer for LifesiteNews, writing under a pseudonym, penned a column titled, “The day my kid found hardcore porn on his iPhone.” But it’s really, “The day I found hardcore porn on my kid’s iPhone.”Â
An editor’s note states that “Abby Moore is a pseudonym for a LifeSiteNews writer who wishes to protect her family’s anonymity.”
And yet, she offers up revealing details about her family, risking exposing her 10-year old son to ridicule.
“With a busy senior in the house cramming for her AP exams and getting ready for prom, a fourth-grader frantically trying to bring up his Geography score after a failed state capitals test, and a kindergartener whose math homework consists of the sort of activities that eat up an hour of your night…”
“Moore” writes she checked the search history on her 10-year old’s iPhone.Â
As soon as I brought up the history, my stomach sank. The search terms told the story in stark, broken phrases – most of which I can’t even print here because they’re too explicit.
It all started innocently enough – he apparently searched for an “underwear mod for Minecraft,†presumably because he thought it would be hilarious to see Steve walking around in his underpants. That seemingly innocuous search obviously brought up tangentially related results he wasn’t prepared to see, and his search terms quickly shifted in a more disturbing direction. “Naked people.â€Â “Naked boys.â€Â “Naked men.â€Â “What is gay?â€Â The browser history was even worse – search terms like that naturally led him straight to the bowels of the internet – including a porn video that traumatized me just by reading the title. I didn’t have the heart to watch it, but knowing my little boy probably had – I was shattered.
My heart broke for him as I realized what must have been going on in his innocent young mind. It all started with a relatively innocent search, and his curiosity took him from there. Unfortunately it took him to places he never wanted to go, and he was left wondering about his own sexuality just because he’d stumbled across some naked pictures on the internet.
But it’s her self-congratulatory parenting and her denigration of homosexuality that is the most troubling.
I told him that what he had seen wasn’t normal, wasn’t real sexuality. I explained, for the first time, in explicit but appropriate terms, exactly what sex is and what it is for, and that it’s something God wants us to save for marriage so that all the babies who come from sex will have moms and dads to love them and raise them. I asked him if he thought he was gay. He said he didn’t know. I pointed out that all his crushes have been on girls, and that seemed to reassure him. I told him it was normal to be curious about people’s bodies and about sex, but that if he ever has questions, he needs to ask me or his dad, not Siri or Google.Â
He begged me not to tell his father – he was so sure he would be angry. I promised him he wouldn’t be. (My husband has had his own struggles with pornography in the past, and I knew he, of all people, would be sympathetic while also being able to convey just how damaging porn can be. Later that evening, they went for a walk and had their own long talk. It seemed to help.)Â
“Moore” concludes, “I doubt he’ll go looking again for naked people for a long, long time.”
What she didn’t say to her child was almost as bad as what she did.
She should have said that if he is gay, it’s OK, that she and her family will love him unconditionally and support him, no matter who he turns out to be. As a Christian, she should have told him God made us all, and gay or straight, we’re all perfect. And she should have told him sex — gay or straight — is a natural expression of love.
What would you have done?
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