SIMI VALLEY : Strip Club Foes Hold Anti-Porn Rally at City Hall

Their faces lit by the glow of flickering candles, more than 150 Simi Valley residents gathered outside City Hall on Monday night to rally against pornography--and against a nude dance club proposed for the city’s west end.

The crowd, including dozens of children, listened as rape victim Barbara Gage warned, “One of every three women have been, or will be, the victim of rape because of pornography.” Gage said she was kidnaped, assaulted and shot 25 years ago and survived only because police pulled over the car in which she was being abducted. “It’s happening next door. It’s happening down the street. We’re only fooling ourselves to think that it’s not.”

The rally of songs, speeches and silent prayer was staged by Simi Citizens R Against Pornography (SCRAP), an increasingly vocal, grass-roots group that was organized this summer to oppose a proposed strip club and adult bookstore.

SCRAP brought other speakers to exhort the crowd to fight pornography in all of its forms.

“Pornography is an evil because it dehumanizes us and depersonalizes us,” said Father Dennis Mongrain, pastor of St. Peter Claver in Simi Valley.

And Sheriff’s Cmdr. Robert Brooks told the demonstrators that 78% of men who sexually assault boys and 80% of those who molest girls act out what they have seen in pornographic material. “This isn’t good, clean fun,” Brooks said. “Pornography is a business. It’s a sickness, but it’s a business.”

Retired social worker Clara Davis, 70, said, “My granddaughter is 9 years old, and I want her to grow up in a clean town. We’ll leave the pornography and crimes and drugs, as much as possible, on the other side of the hill.”