My view: Sierra Newbold a victim of America's apathy to pornography problem

There was a pathetic degree of irony on the front page of the B Section of the June 30, 2012 issue of the Deseret News. Side by side were the photos of the "vigil" participants in memory of Sierra Newbold and the photo of Steven Powell. Powell, a convicted voyeurist, is to be released from a 30-month prison sentence in May 2013. Powell's images of choice were of nude young girls.

There is little doubt that when the man who killed Sierra Newbold is finally discovered his profile will be very familiar. Somehow we all seem to have forgotten a little girl by the name of Destiny Norton.

During the last week of July 2006, the murder of a 5-year-old girl named Destiny Norton was front page news in Salt Lake City. As details of the sordid crime became public, including the fact that after he had murdered Destiny the culprit admitted that he had raped her, expressions of sympathy and condolence to her family poured forth from throughout the state.

Her funeral was widely reported by the media. Within 48 hours the memory of Destiny and the unspeakable horror that filled the last few minutes of her life began to fade. A month after her murder few people were able to remember her name. A year after her murder very few people could remember the event. This casualness by which our society reacts to the ongoing process of children being kidnapped, raped and then murdered by man-made aliens is incomprehensible.

The murder and rape of Destiny was a repeat of a sadomasochistic fantasy that appears frequently in pornographic materials.

Police investigators have reported on thousands of actual cases in which a child, young girl or boy, teenager or adult woman has been kidnapped, sexually tortured and then ultimately murdered. In many of these situations a search of the culprit's living space has revealed the presence of pornography in which the same crime was detailed.

Sierra Newbold's tragic fate was a re-enactment by the culprit of some deranged obscene fantasy found so often in the more extreme forms of pornography.

Like Destiny Norton, Sierra Newbold's death is one more statistic confirming that the repeated visual and mental consumption by the pornography addict ultimately overwhelms any remaining sense of humanity. The only way that he can re-experience the chemical "high" of this sordid fantasy is to actually carry it out.

So who killed Destiny Norton and Sierra Newbold? We all did. We did it with our passive shrug of the shoulders for the continuing production and distribution of materials that cannot be described in this newspaper.

This past week Brent Ward, the former U.S. Attorney for Utah and the past head of the anti-pornography section of the federal Department of Justice made this comment: "The Government won't help solve this problem because it can't help. The reason it can't help is because there is no mandate from the people to deal with it."

Who are those people who will not give the government a mandate to stop the process that takes people and creates "aliens" addicted to pornography who murder little girls? We are.

Our hypocrisy is vividly presented on the front page of the B Section of the Saturday, June 30, 2012, issue of the Deseret News.

John L. Harmer is chairman of The Lighted Candle Society and a resident of Bountiful, Utah.