Further Reading

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The First 'American' State   Ohio Goes to the Movies  ** In Your Head

October 2001

In Your Head

Phil Burress, president of Cincinnati's Citizens for Community Values since 1991, is a self-described recovering porn addict who conducted an anti-pornography workshop at the 2001 Reclaiming America for Christ convention in Newport Beach, California. Reclaiming America is an offshoot of Florida's homophobic Coral Ridge Ministries; Burress and his organization have joined forces with Coral Ridge on a number of projects, including the 1998 "Truth in Love" campaign promoting ex-gay conversion programs.

Burress's second wife, Vickie Bowman Burress, is director of the Indiana branch of Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association (AFA). A dedicated foe of the gay community, she was one of the chief promoters of the Indiana Defense of Marriage Act. She divorced her first husband, an unrepentant porn fan, in 1996. Longtime colleagues Bowman and Burress claim that love bloomed only after her divorce, when they connected at an AFA conference.

According to Reclaiming America's online summary of Phil Burress's recent porn address, the CCV president revealed that a porn addiction beginning at age 14 had "captivated his teen years and young adult life" and wrecked his first marriage. "The problem with pornography," Burress tells his audience, "is that it puts images in your head that shouldn't be there." The remedy is strict self-control reinforced by channeling one's psyche into a commitment to restore traditional values. Burress says the determining factor in his personal turnaround, however, was his acceptance of Christ on September 6, 1980.

Echoing anti-sex feminists, he decries the "objectification" of women and cites doubtful statistics linking pornography to rape and other sex crimes. For a once-compulsive porn consumer, Burress speaks with a curious lack of authority about his own obsession; his pronouncements about porn's contents and effects seem based on a queasy fusion of Christian and feminist dogma-- not on any direct exposure to adult material.

CCV maintains close relationships with both the AFA and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. Family Friendly Libraries, originally based in Fairfax, Virginia, but created under the auspices of CCV at a 1995 conference in Cincinnati, is now apparently based in Cincinnati as a project of CCV. Burress's brother Gene heads an anti-gay organization called Equal Rights Not Special Rights.

In partnership with the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, CCV promotes an initiative called Model Cities of America, a scheme to support "community-driven efforts to battle pornography and its harms" by finding ways to drive sexually oriented businesses out of participating cities and towns

When it was announced in July 2000 that openly gay US Representative Jim Kolbe would address the Republican Presidential convention, Phil Burress suggested that the Congressman be arrested as a confessed sodomite the next time he set foot in Arizona, his home state, where sodomy laws remain on the books. Ohio gay activists pointed out that Kolbe might consider moving to Burress's home state, where sodomy laws were abolished more than a quarter of a century ago.