Interview

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James Hartline speaks out on vice in San Diego

By Larry Knowles

February 13, 2006

Christian activist James Hartline knows vice. He spent his teen years and most of his adult life abusing drugs, stealing, and engaging in high-risk sex--behavior that landed him in prison for nearly twenty years. Six years ago, however, he cashiered his destructive lifestyle and turned to the Bible for guidance. He spoke with Vyuz editor Larry Knowles about an array of local social and political issues, from pornography to stem cell research. The following excerpts cover Hartline's views on vice in the San Diego area.

What’s foremost on your agenda right now?

My main impetus at this point in time is cleaning up what I feel to be corruption in its totality, regardless of what side of the fence it falls on. For me, it’s not a republican versus democrat thing, or conservative versus liberal, or homosexual versus not homosexual.

I think the thing that people get skewed about me is that they assume I’m targeting one specific area, but I only target the things that come around me.

People think that because I focus a lot on the corruption within the homosexual agenda that I’m somehow distilled with all sorts of vehement hate towards people involved in homosexuality. They’re skewed in their understanding of why I go after what I go after.

It goes back to the principal of “Clean up your own back yard before you clean up somebody else’s.”

Going after pornography is a big thing because I know it hurts a lot of people, and a lot of people find that offensive. They’re adults. They enjoy those kinds of things. So they feel what I’m doing is infringing on their adult enjoyment. They’re not able to disassociate what they’re doing with the fact that it might be hurting kids.

There’s a porn store next to a bus stop. The kids get on and off, and the kids can see in the window. The people that run those stores, and the people that are customers, think it’s great that it’s there, because they have access to it, and the people who own it are making money. It’s not even on their radar that this stuff could potentially hurt kids. They don’t even identify with that aspect of it, and that’s terrible.

Do you think all porn is bad for all people?

It depends on what your perspective is. I think porn is bad. There’re people who love it. I used to watch it all the time. I know what it did to me personally, so I can say from a personal point of view that it was bad for me.

I think, from my spiritual beliefs, that it’s wrong. First off, the Bible says it’s wrong. Secondly, it elevates people’s private sexual affairs into the public arena. To me, it’s not healthy.

Actors and actresses of pornography are consenting adults. Wouldn’t it be acceptable for consenting adults to do this sort of thing?

That depends on the cultural definition of “acceptable.” Who’s defining that? What area are people basing their moral judgements on? If you want to base your moral judgements on consent, which is a man-made issue, rather than spiritual, spiritual aspects don’t define man-made law.

Man defines man-made laws. You can get off track if you want to secularize everything. I don’t secularize things. I spiritualize things.

Is it healthy for adults to have sex, be photographed, and then parade that for the whole world to see? When they say, “Well, we’re adults. We get paid for it. We can do what we want,” it’s profiteering off of private sexual areas. It really gets down to the heart of why people are doing it. They know that people’s sexual desires can be stimulated off of these images. They’re basically playing into people’s human desires and then hooking them on it so they can make money. It’s still prostitution.

What’s your definition of pornography?

From a spiritual point of view? From a spiritual point of view, porneo means fornication, and ography means taking pictures thereof. So, it’s the taking pictures of fornication.

I align myself with what the Bible says. The Bible says fornication is a sin. So, to take pictures of sin, to me, is immoral. It really all depends on whether someone is going to align themselves spiritually with the Bible or not. If somebody doesn’t agree with the Bible, they’re going to think I’m crazy. They’re not going to agree with me. If they’re making money off of it, they’re going to not only say they don’t agree with me, but they’re going to try to marginalize me, because I’m interfering with their financial arrangements.

So, it’s primarily fornication?

--Well that’s what pornography is. It’s the taking of pictures of fornication.

As I know it, there are different gradients to pornography. There’s soft core pornography. There’s hard core pornography.

Yeah, but those are definitions that are made up by man. That doesn’t have anything to do with the Biblical description thereof.

It’s either wrong or it’s not. It’s either right or wrong according to the Bible. It’s not a gray area. The Bible isn’t gray. Man wants to gray the area so that you can play around with definitions.

See, you can allow someone to take you off to a view point that is skewed by their personal preferences, and laws, and what’s right and wrong, and as you say, grades thereof.

Would you say that your definition of pornography, as referred to in the Bible, would also be a man-made definition?

Well, the laws that originally existed in this country were based on and evolved from the Bible. And as man got away from the Bible, they began to evolve those laws according to their standard and began to marginalize and push the Bible away.

A lot of the laws, as they’re established now, don’t reflect what the Bible says. People don’t want to bring the Bible back into it because it means reigning in those laws that have evolved.

If you take the people who are involved in sexual sin and how many people have died—so many people have died—and yet people want to deny that the consequence of the sexual sin is death. The evidence is overwhelming. People are dying from sexually transmitted diseases all over the world, and yet people want to ignore it. To bring the consequence back to behavior means that people have to start checking themselves about what they’re doing, and say, “You know what? If I keep doing this, I’m gonna die.”

Why go after the gay community? There’s certainly heterosexual porn. There’s gay porn.

--But you didn’t hear what I said, did you? Where do I live?

It’s “all around you,” yes.

And what did I say, though? I’m dealing with the things that are in my neighborhood, correct? So, you just did what they said. “Well, he’s just targeting them.” No, I’m targeting the things that are around me.

You’ve focused your attention on the homosexual community—

That’s not necessarily true. It’s just that those are the things that get published the most in the media. But, if you understand that I write every day and I send out citizen’s alerts—I send out hundreds of those—maybe out of the hundreds and hundreds that I’ve done, maybe fifteen of those hundreds have been highlighted in the media for homosexual issues. That makes them look proportionally larger than all the other things I’ve done. (Continued)

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