Neil Gallagher

When I decided to read and review How to Stop the Porno Plague, I wanted to learn more about the author, Neil Gallagher. I knew I wanted to know more about the man when the book's "Forewarning" (Gallagher decided to call the Forward a Forewarning and the Epigraph a Forward for some reason) cautioned me that "If you're not willing to die for your hatred of Pornography, stop."

Searches for older and lesser-known authors tend to be problematic, especially with more common names, and Neil Gallagher was no different. Numerous searches showed up for a young man who killed his roommate during a play fight, a former New Jersey politician, and some guy called The Money Doctor. William Neil "Doc" Gallagher came up the most due to his low-tier fame as a Christian radio show host financial planner, and because he was arrested in 2019 in a $29 million-dollar Ponzi scheme. Ironically, I also found two articles from 2018 about his winning “Best Retirement Financial Planner - 2018” and renting a local theatre to present a free public showing of It's a Wonderful Life as a community Christmas gift. But I digress...

The Money Doctor was showing up in LibraryThing and Goodreads as being the author of Porno Plague, but it seemed more like two obscure authors with similar names being conflated. All the articles discussing the Money Doctor described only a career in Texas starting with a Doctorate from Brown University, while the bio for Neil Gallagher in Porno Plague only mentions the author being "born in New York and educated in Massachussetts and Rhode Island," and "doctoral studies in Philosophy and Psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati Graduate School and College of Medicine. Both authors appeared to have vastly different backgrounds, and despite both of them writing novels with a religious theme (The Money Doc wrote Jesus Christ: Money Master), none of the online bios I could find for the Money Doc mentioned Porno Plague among his list of books, and even lists provided of publications that carried the works of the authors had no common titles among them.

So, two different authors. It must be.

Then - FINALLY - an online Bio for The Money Doc goes into a bit more detail about his past: "After getting his PhD from Brown University in 1981, Dr. Gallagher became the first man from Rhode Island to join the Peace Corps, serving in NW Thailand as a teacher and medic in leper colonies." Finally, Rhode Island is in play! Now who else served in the Peace Corps teaching lepers? Well, it turns out Porno Plague author Gallagher ALSO did the exact same thing, although his author bio in Porno Plague states that his Peace Corps stint occurred between 1963 and 1965. While the dates provided in the bios contradict one another, it appears that The Money Doctor was quite successful in obscuring his northern background while selling his Ponzi scheme financial guru brand as an authentic Texan personality.

Why am I including all of this in my book review? Honestly, I find it fascinating when researching obscure authors from past generations involve this kind of detective work just to get an idea of the author's body of work. But, more importantly, I think it's important for a book of this type, which espouses unflinching judgement on a moal and spiritual level, to be fully connected to the author who is so passionate in his hatred of pornography that he wants you to literally die fighting it. In this case, the morally superior author calling for the death of smut eventually abandoned medicine and teaching to pursue a career in Texas as a Christian financial planner and media celebrity, where he used his position to steal millions of dollars from elderly investors. So there's that.

But about that book review...

Chapter One dives right in and introduces us to what he calls the two "biggest kicks" in pornography: Bestiality and Pedophilia. Gallagher glosses over the horse sex so he can go into great detail about the kiddie porn industry (including a lengthy excerpt from a 1977 Time magazine article, "Child's Garden of Perversity") before spinning around to blame the entore child porn racket on Playboy magazine. The authority figure he turns to for support of this claim is J. Edgar Hoover, who needless to say is now publicly known to been up to deviant behaviours that would have been frowned upon by the author. But I digress...

After an anti-smut quote from the crossdressing G-Man, Gallagher says that "The Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography includes extensive police files showing that Hoover was, unfortunately, right," followed by three pages of police blotter records presumably taken from the report. I'm not surprised that Gallagher prefered quoting crime statistics instead of the commission's overall findings, seeing as how Congress and Nixon both rejected the findings of the commission: That there is no evidence that pornography causes violent behavior and moral perversion, and that pornography should not be banned from being pucrhased by consenting adults. I'm paraphrasing, you can look up the whole thing. It's quite long.

One thing you often find scattered through propaganda novels such as this are brief descriptions of past crimes with no reference cited. Example?

Page 15: "In the summer of 1973, the attention of the world turned to Houston where police dug up the bodies of twenty-two teenage boys. They had been sexually abused and murdered by Elmer Wayne Henley and Dean Corll. Police found in their apartment sex-torture devices sold in pornography shops."

I never heard of this crime, so I did my research. Two films have been made about the killings, and several books were written, one of which it turned out I actually own a copy of, but I stuck to online research to save time. After reading through numerous accounts of the murders and crime scenes to find out what these nefareous "sex-torture devices" could be purchased from the back of a Playboy in the 1970s, I finally figured out what Gallagher was alluding to. Dildoes. The killer had dildoes that he would use on his victims (and possible himself). I'm aware that magazines used to advertise vibrators as Personal Massage Devices, but I've never seen a vintage ad for a twelve-inch black ribbed Sex-Torure Device.

He pulls the same thing a few pages later when he claims "editors of Screw magazine were recently arrested for their (successful) attempts to 'buy' from parents the sexual services of their children[.]" I spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes searching online (this is why these older books take so long to read and review!) and could find no mention of any such event. The easy (accurate) assumption is that this is a twisted description of one of the numerous obscenity charges filed against Al Goldstein during his career as a pornographer. I think I'm going to start calling these "Dildo Moments." Copyright Pending.

Page 25: "Police say porno ignites sex crimes. Criminals say porno ignites sex crimes. Psychiatrists say porno ignites sex crimes."

Some might, sure. But the majority? No, they don't. Maybe the obscenity commission should have hit Gallagher up for an interview list.

You probably get the idea by now...

Chapter One includes a lot of article clippings about Mafia involvement in pornography, which I guess is the conservative backup argument in case "porn turns children into rapists" fails to hook the audience. Of course, I understand that the Mafia is also pretty fond of the Vatican, but that doesn't help the case against smut, so we'll leave that behind as we forge ahead into Chapter Two, where Gallagher introduces us to "How to Get Rid of Pornography. From there on, the book is mainly comprised of two main topics: Reasons why Pornography is a greater threat to America than cancer and communism combined, and how to organize groups of rabble-rousers to bully local communities and governments into agreeing.

I could easily break down the hilarious flaws inherent in the arguments provided within on a page-by-page basis - the chapter explaining how classical works of art containing nudity don't count as pornography is a wonderfully unintentional work of closeted homoerotica - but you probably get the point by now. How to Stop the Porno Plague is a moral con job written by a convicted felon with the goal of selling overpriced materials and acquiring mailing lists of gullible rubes to sell to other con artists. Baffling, but occasionally humorous.… (mehr)