We welcome letters to the editor. Letters appear two issues after the article to which they are responding. Letters under three hundred words are preferred, and they may be edited for length and clarity.
Letters responding to articles published in this issue should be received by April 4 for publication in the June/July issue. Please send them to ft@firstthings.com.
Hungarianism
Thank you for Philip Pilkington’s well-deserved response (“Farewell to Liberal-Imperial Diplomacy,” February 2025) to an American embarrassment: Ambassador David Pressman. The Biden-appointed ambassador to Hungary was an example of “rainbow diplomacy,” the State Department’s practice of aggressively promoting LGBTQ media in lieu of the patriotic niceties that usually compose diplomacy. Rainbow diplomacy frequently clashes with (and often seems to supersede) American interests.
I will quibble with the importance that Pilkington attaches to Pressman, only because it is indicative of a pathology of the American right: Hungarianism. While Hungary’s leadership is certainly saner than that of its neighbors, the often-repeated idea that Hungary is a last bastion of the West, one that is any more important than Kazakhstan or Honduras (Hungary’s peers in GDP and population, respectively), is preposterous. The West will not be saved by an unarmed, landlocked, EU-dependent republic—a horseless Rohirrim. One cannot have Christian civilization without Christians, and, in terms of religious practice, Hungary is thoroughly European—that is, secular.
Like the paleoconservatives before them, who convinced themselves that the cause of Serbian nationalism was near and dear to the heart of the American working man, Hungarianists overestimate the appeal of their fixations. One wonders, is the prevalence of Hungarianism on the American right due to Hungarian state funding?
Liam Hill
kalamazoo, michigan
A Wicked Joke
I appreciated Liel Leibovitz’s recent column (“Wickedness,” February 2024). He rightly and wisely condemns a contemporary Hollywood that is unable to give audiences proper villainy from which people can, by contrast, learn about virtue.
As a lifelong Wicked fan, however, I must disagree with his characterization of Elphaba and the consequences thereof. The play is not called Wicked because Elphaba was destined to become evil due to life circumstances. It has that name because she is not actually wicked. It’s a joke.
Elphaba is unjustly smeared as a wicked individual by a society that is desperately looking for a scapegoat. The play and movie are not commenting on moral determinism; they are commenting on the power of propaganda and the complicated reality that always lies behind it.
We may disagree on the quality of the movie or the effectiveness of the message, but it is definitely not claiming that she is trapped in a certain moral path. Just as she does, we can and must choose a better one.
Pilar Saucedo
vienna, virginia
Bad Anthropology
Clare Morell and Brad Littlejohn (“Parents Can’t Fight Porn Alone,” February 2025) eviscerate the “parents’ rights” argument for open-access pornography. I applaud them for their work protecting children from porn and was honored to be mentioned in their Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton amicus brief.
But as a member of Gen Z, I wonder if the anti-porn coalition engages enough with why porn harms children. Beyond adverse outcomes and a righteous bipartisan disgust, what actually makes exposure to pornography bad for kids? Invoking “obscenity” or “indecency,” while legally precedented and morally sound, leads us down the wrong path. Rooting our opposition in such concepts only sustains the popular straw man that the defense of traditional sexual mores arises from infantilization and puritanism, from retrograde prissiness and Victorian clucking. In brief: We’re just prudes.
Pope John Paul II provides an onramp to the right road: “The problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of a person, but that it shows far too little.” To venture a step further: The problem with pornography goes beyond the evil done to the person watching, or even to the person performing; it warps the metaphysics of the person itself.
As Pope John Paul II knew and often said, the myriad problems of modernity often arise from a meager vision of the human person. The essential problem with porn is not that it makes adolescents losers and puts them into mortal sin, or that it alerts preadolescents to the body and sex. Porn essentially harms children because it presents no “adequate anthropology”; in fact, the anthropology it presents proves exceedingly inadequate.
Online porn shatters dignitas infinitas by reducing an extraordinary, singular personhood to a pixelated consumable, rather than recognizing each and every human being as an embodied soul and remarkable phenomenon. Porn presents a child, the ultimate moral work-in-progress, with a deficient and depraved account of the self, love, and how we ought to treat each other (even outside of intimacy). It teaches kids that a person is something to view from afar, commodify, and objectify, and its accessibility to children is an excellent way to spawn a generation of media-obsessed, atomized hyper-consumerists.
Our instinctive objection to kids having access online porn is not enough. We must continue to articulate and advocate an adequate anthropology.
Isabel Hogben
rye, new york
Clare Morell and Brad Littlejohn’s article “Parents Can’t Fight Porn Alone” is an important reminder about the need for society at large to tackle the scourge of pornography. Unfortunately, Congress has until now not merely failed in its duty as parens patriae to protect children, but it has actively if inadvertently protected the porn industry through legislation. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) was initially intended to shield children from indecent material by allowing platforms to remove it without liability for content discrimination. It was meant to work together with the rest of the CDA, which criminalized the transmission of obscene, indecent, and patently offensive material. That part of the Act was struck down by the Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU, and, as a result, Section 230 has in fact harmed the fight against pornography. The law safeguards large porn platforms, such as Pornhub, as long as they serve as repositories of content from various providers (whether individuals or larger porn companies).
Over the years, Section 230 has been modified in several ways because of the problems it caused. For example, in 2018, CDA was amended to allow sex-trafficking victims to recover damages from platforms—most notably, Backpage—that essentially facilitated sex trafficking by hosting paid advertisements. However, no such exception exists for revenge porn or other extremely harmful content. One could argue that the Section 230 protections for these sites are required by the First Amendment. But this is a misunderstanding of the First Amendment, which reads that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” Leaving aside whether pornography falls under the obscenity exception to the First Amendment, private tort actions—such as lawsuits against porn platforms—do not necessarily require an act of Congress. These types of private actions, which rely primarily on common law principles, should still be permissible. (This may require revisiting some of the language from New York Times v. Sullivan, a decision that was mostly likely incorrect.) Allowing parents and concerned organizations to sue platforms for hosting pornography and targeting children is a mechanism that could prove powerful in the battle against pornography transmission and addiction.
As more and more evidence builds of precisely how dangerous and destructive porn is, society needs many tools to address the problem. Modifying or even repealing Section 230 would be an important step in ensuring that Congress isn’t inadvertently protecting the porn industry. As Morell and Littlejohn argue, parents need all the help they can get.
Darren Geist
washington, d.c.
The Tipping Point
The timeliness of this month’s piece on forgiveness (“Forgiveness: A Statement by Jews and Christians,” February 2025) goes without saying. It sits squarely in what all regard as a polarized, divisive era. Scapegoats abound. Lazarus’s stench is driving us away. I spent three years in formation in a Dominican convent, and through those years I started to live. Having previously attended a Dominican university, I was surprised to find the sterile, studious mien become an animated, lively ever-Easter. Forgiveness is the heart of Judeo-Christianity, and I found it in the consecrated life.
Central to my time in religious life was an experience of forgiving a superior. It became a tipping point, and I always think of that period with a before and after: before I learned what forgiveness meant, before I learned what it meant to trust the Church, before I learned the peace that comes in forgiveness’s shadow, and after; before I knew forgiveness, and lived, and after.
After that experience I spent another year there before the same superior was influential in my decision to leave. A woman whose faults are well-known to me shaped me in ways that she didn’t understand. Without having learned to forgive her, I never would have learned to live again; without her conviction that my time there was done, I never could have made the plunge to go home. Without my trust that God works through his Church, I never would have heard his voice.
“Forgiveness: A Statement by Jews and Christians” found a long way to say one thing: Forgiveness restores life. Forgiveness is the resurrection. Forgiveness is the power and strength of Christians and Jews because, with it, you, too, can give life. You can restore Lazarus simply by choosing to do so, and you can become the Christ when you do. Amid vitriol and blaming, we can be fertile balm.
Anna Kennedy
westchester, california
Holy Land Christians
I was initially excited to see an article on Palestinian Christians in First Things (“The Patriarch and the Palestinians,” February 2025), but as I began reading, it became apparent to me that the author does not give an adequate representation of the problems besetting our brothers and sisters in Christ in Palestine. To put the matter bluntly, in all of my conversations with Middle-Eastern Christians—Palestinian or Lebanese, Maronite or Coptic Orthodox or Protestant, in Egypt or in America—I have never heard the views imputed to them in Aronson’s article.
I present two instances, of many. Aronson attributes the criticisms of Israel made by Patriarch Pizzabella to the delicate situation of Christians vis-a-vis Muslims: Public criticisms of the Israeli state function to simultaneously shore up the position of Christians relative to Muslims (for fear of reprisal) and to apply pressure to the state to protect them. If this were the genuine motivation of Palestinian Christians, one would expect a divergence between publicly and privately expressed views. Such a divergence is hard to come by. Indeed, anecdotally, I have never met a fellow Copt in Egypt or a Maronite or a Rūm Catholic Palestinian who did not criticize Israel more forcefully in private than in public. Less anecdotally, 40,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been displaced by the Israeli military in recent months, and hundreds have been killed. Under such circumstances, one rather suspects Pizzaballa would criticize Israel less forcefully than he might otherwise—no shepherd wishes to make his sheep targets of Israel’s military.
Aronson also suggests that the Christians sheltering in Holy Family Church have been protected because of the goodwill of the IDF. Perhaps. But I suspect Pope Francis’s unflagging advocacy for this church has had more to do with the safety of those sheltering therein. After all, the IDF has shown little hesitation in bombing churches in Lebanon and razing Maronite villages there. In October 2024, Israel bombed St. George Melkite Catholic Church in Derdghaya, killing eight people seeking refuge within it. A separate airstrike targeted its parish offices and destroyed the home of its priest. In November 2024, Israeli soldiers broke into a church in the village of Deir Mimas and mocked Christian marriage liturgies while pantomiming obscene acts on the floor. Similar examples could be multiplied.
There are well-positioned Christians from Middle-Eastern backgrounds who can speak to these issues.
It is a duty of charity for Christians to support one another at all times. In times of distress, such charity calls for publishing Middle-Eastern Christians who can speak to their own commitments and concerns.
Onsi Aaron Kamel
princeton, new jersey
