Dayton Moore

            My VIP for this week is Dayton Moore, the general manager for the Kansas City Royals baseball team. The name means nothing to me because I do not follow professional baseball or any sports team. I am impressed with Moore because he had the courage to stand and face something that he considers to be evil.

            Moore has been involved with baseball for nearly thirty years. He has seen things during those years that concerned him. He saw many different problems, and he realized that “every major issue that we dealt with … traced back to pornography.” He explained that baseball players are people – not assets or commodities – with some of the same struggles that afflict people around the world.

            So Moore decided to do something about the root of the problems. He asked a group known as Fight the New Drug, a nonprofit anti-pornography activist group, to visit with his team about pornography. In doing so the Royals became the first major league team to tackle the problem directly.

            In his remarks at the recent Utah Coalition Against Pornography conference held in Salt Lake City, Moore made the following comment.

When we continue to look the other way, it’s not going to get better…. What you permit, you promote, what you fail to confront, you condone. I don’t sleep at night when we don’t confront issues that are hurting our team, our family, our community.

            Moore told a group of more than 2,000 attendees that general managers speak with their athletes about numerous other problems, such as domestic violence and financial responsibility. He believes that he is responsible to warn his players about pornography because it is “destroying our kids, and hurting their thought process.”

            There were other speakers at the annual conference who spoke of the dangers of pornography. They include Taylor Chambers, a licensed marriage and family therapist and founder of Porn-Resilient Parenting, and Martin Roundy, a psychotherapist who works for the State of Utah Division of Child & Family Services and has 23 years of experience working with survivors of childhood trauma.

            Chambers explained that the parental reaction to their children viewing pornography will either help them to grow into healthy adults or will shut them down. Reacting with anger, punishment, lecturing, or tears will not help youth deal with pornography appropriately.

When (our kids) are using porn or have accidentally run into porn, they are very much like that kid on the mountain [who was bitten by a snake]. They’re curled up and wounded and when we start putting our spotlight somewhere else, they’re left in the dark. That’s not a situation we want to put our kids in. We want to be right there, focused first and foremost on helping them out.

            Chambers suggested that the best thing that a parent or spouse can do is to start asking questions and then listening to the answers. He said that it might open up the discussion if the parent or spouse acknowledged their discomfort in the discussion.

            Roundy stressed that it was important to discover the reason for the trauma that is driving the pornography habit. He says that there is usually a reason for “thorny behavior” whether that behavior is pornography, drugs, or something else. “The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be able to recover from trauma. Love is the greatest healing power in the universe.”

            So it sounds like Moore is on the right track by opening the door to discussions about pornography with his players. He seems to be truly concerned about his players and their marriages and families.