We in Uganda should be our own man on porn!

SIR— I was disappointed by Kevin O’Connor’s article “Pornography: Uganda ain’t seen nothing yet” in The Sunday Monitor of June 16.While commenting on a letter by John Kamuli (“Ban publication of erotic pictures”) that appeared in The New Vision of June 13, O’Connor made some erroneous and misleading observations, not to mention the uncalled for vulgarity.Firstly, pornography may be many things; but it certainly is not boring, much less harmless. According to O’Connor, pornography is any book, magazine, film etc, dealing with or depicting sexual acts in a more or less explicit way intended to arouse sexual excitement.Now for O’Connor to go on and say that the photographs that routinely appear in The Red Pepper are not pornographic is masking the truth. If photographs of boys and girls copulating or posing in other indecent ways is not enough to arouse one’s sexual feelings, then I think O’Connor is operating under very different laws of nature, or he has a limitless capacity for self-deception.The most illuminating text O’Connor’s articles, however, was: “In other words, what gets published in Uganda falls short of what is considered pornography elsewhere.” O’Connor was brought up in the West, a place where permissiveness in moral matters holds sway. This is an area in the world where people have cast off their moral moorings, where situational ethics is the way. So one can safely infer from his statement that he is used to much worse stuff than what we are currently seeing in Uganda.In such a situation, anything goes. That is why one reads of so much sexual perversion in the West: people having sex with animals and corpses; of bishops molesting minors; of men wedding men and women wedding women under the stupefied gaze of so-called men of God.There is a lot I admire in the West like their democratic institutions, the rule of law, civil liberties and their technological advancement. But in the area of morals, I am afraid, the West is in a steep decline.Pre-occupation with sex is one of the marks of a dying civilisation. Immorality is said to have been one of the factors that led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and other ancient civilisations. It will lead to the fall of the current age unless we change the way we conduct ourselves.Uganda and other so-called third world countries have not yet succumbed to this decadence. So it is in our interest that we do all we can to preserve our values. Look at AIDS, teenage pregnancies, defilement and rape and the break-up of marriages. We should do all we can to put a stop to the cesspool of pornography that is already making inroads into our nation.Let all well-meaning Ugandans join John Kamuli in speaking up against pornography. Like someone said, “The only thing required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”Stephen NakonyaKampala