Re: March 9 Kathleen Parker column.
The Marine Corps pornography revelations can in no way be condoned, and that organization should do what it needs to do to clean up what it is responsible for. However, using this incident as a way to draw general conclusions about the Marines as an organization is misplaced.
What this is all about is a group of men with a common background and a mode of communication sharing pornography from a ready source. That dynamic has been going on probably since prehistory, given the sexual appetites that many men share. So don’t be surprised if the next revelation of a similar sort concerns some other group of men with a different common background, be it another government agency, a private employer, a service organization, a labor union, a group of Facebook friends. The list can go on and on. This is to explain what can happen, not to justify it.
When I became a seventh-grader back in the mid-1960s, I and some of my male friends were passing around pictures of nude women torn from Playboy magazines as well as typewritten transcripts of pornographic books from an unknown source. None of us were or had been in the Marine Corps at the time.
Stanley D. Young, Fort Collins
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