FULTON, N.Y. – Stop when this starts to sound familiar: A former porn star remakes herself as preacher’s wife, embraces Jesus as her personal savior and thoroughly renounces her porn past to the cheers and adulation of decent people everywhere.

Sounds like the story of Theresa Carey, right? Well, now it’s also the story of Crystal Bassette (with the added wrinkle that Bassette became a preacher herself).

On the other hand, there’s the former porn star who quietly leaves the industry, gets a job as a teacher, reportedly performs well in that capacity, then gets outed over her past and summarily terminated amidst the scorn and ire of decent people everywhere.

Sound like the story of Stacie Halas? Well, as you know, it’s now also the story of Resa Woodward.

In the case of both Halas and Woodward, the ex-performers speak of desperate circumstances leading them to perform in porn, with Woodward describing her experience as nothing less than sexual slavery to an older, domineering, physically and psychologically abusive man.

In all four cases, the women said they regret their past in porn, but the expression of regret, painful memories and pleading for understanding have had little impact on the authorities who hold the fate of the would-be teachers in their hands. Meanwhile the communities in which they worship and/or preach seem to have embraced Carey and Bassette without asking the kind of cynical, skeptical questions that have dogged teachers like Halas and Woodward.

I’m in no way suggesting people should shun or regard with suspicion Carey and Bassette. I don’t happen to be religious, but if their newfound faith has brought them happiness and peace, in all sincerity I say more power to them.

What I want to know is this: If people can accept ex-performers as preachers, why are so many of those same people inclined to reject ex-performers as teachers?

If the answer is the proximity to young people on the part of teachers, someone needs to explain to me why a former porn star is any more likely to do harm to a child than a Catholic priest — and good luck finding the data to support your claim, considering all the Boston Globe uncovered about the church’s cover-up of abuse cases in 2002.

If the answer is “people trust the likes of Carey and Bassette more because they’ve been open about their porn past, as opposed to the teachers whose performance work was discovered by others,” then people are being either disingenuous or naïve in justifying their perspective.

Given how ex-performers have been received when trying to transition to virtually any non-porn employment, what rational person would inform her prospective employer of her past work in porn? Do those who think it duplicitous for women like Halas and Woodward to keep their past a secret think they’d be rewarded for such openness and transparency if they were to proactively inform a school district of their past performances?

We can be cold and say young women, in many cases barely old enough to perform in porn legally, should have the foresight to know they’ll pay for their choice through the attachment of a lifelong stigma — but you’d have to be one seriously cruel person to think that way about Halas or Woodward, unless you flatly reject as false everything they’ve said about the circumstances that led them to working in porn.

For the sake of argument though, let’s say Halas and Woodward were women who wnet to work in porn without any extenuating circumstances at all. Why should this disqualify them from a professional life outside porn?

Women have it hard enough in the professional world as it is, confronted as they are by outrageous unfairness in everything from the way they’re compensated to the way they carry themselves on the job. Denying them future career options because they’ve been filmed performing sex acts in the past just adds life-hampering injury to the torrent of insult they inevitably face once their porn past has been revealed.

Sadly, none of this is likely to change anytime soon. What can change, though, is how we in the industry approach situations like this.

Instead of crassly taking advantage to generate publicity by offering a return to porn work to women caught in these circumstances (although to be fair, nobody appears to have done so with respect to Halas or Woodward), or merely shrugging off their plight with a “sucks to be you” attitude, I’d like to see the industry establish a fund from which ex-performers, male and female, could draw in times of need.

If this idea sounds ridiculous to you, consider it also once sounded ridiculous to many professional sports fans and team owners, too — yet here we are today with the NFL Player Care Foundation (created in 2007) and the more recent decision on the part of the National Basketball Players Association to fund healthcare for veterans of the NBA. These organizations are very different from the porn industry, of course, but the core product in each case is entertainment, and just as sports fans wouldn’t have much to be entertained by without professional athletes, porn fans wouldn’t have much to watch without porn performers.

Will the adult industry ever establish such a fund to assist ex-performers? Most likely, the answer is no. But if studios and producers are ever looking for a good means of improving their public image and combating the notion they don’t care about the performers whose work is mission-critical to the life of their businesses, they’d be wise to consider the idea.

Image: Nadia Hilton, via Busty Cafe.