KALAMAZOO, Mich. – According to many of pornography’s most vocal critics, whether they be far-left feminists like Gail Dines or far-right moralists like Phil Burress, there is a causal relationship between porn use and a sweeping list of crimes and social ills, from sexual assault and soaring divorce rates to brain shrinkage and the lifting of God’s protection over America.

When skeptics point to data that doesn’t fit the causality arguments of porn critics, the usual response is to deride the skepticism as flying in the face of common sense — and perhaps more importantly, flying in the face of pathos-filled anecdotal evidence littered with stories of lives destroyed by porn’s corrosive influence.

What significance, I wonder, would some of these same critics invest in the story of Mitchell Hapner of Kalamazoo Michigan, who decided to rid his neighborhood of porn by setting fire to a local adult business?

Would porn’s critics be receptive to the argument their extremist rhetoric aimed at porn and the porn industry had “caused” Hapner to pick up his Crusader’s sword ax, head down to Hollywood Nights and set the accursed place aflame?

After all, Dines, a founding member of Stop Porn Culture, once accused Kink.com of being “in violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture” — and who would blame a guy like Hapner for thinking it was time to fight waterboarding with fire, so to speak?

Other than being absurd on its face — the U.N. Convention in question explicitly applies to circumstances in which “such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity” — Dines’ inflammatory statement about Kink.com just might have a ring of truthiness to it for those already staunchly opposed to porn.

How can people be expected to sit idly by while pornographers torture helpless victims? Sure, there’s absolutely no valid analogy to be made between people who consent to (and are paid for) performing in BDSM videos made in a controlled environment and prisoners of war being thrashed by renegade military officers who aren’t particularly interested in responding to safe words. At the end of the day though, aren’t both the sort of evil that can be responded to only by dousing something in gasoline and setting it on fire?

Burress, president of Ohio-based Citizens for Community Values, makes Dines look like an amateur. His proclamations concerning porn cite an authority far higher than the UN: The Lord Himself.

“Pornography and greed are partners in evil,” reads one of CCV’s countless tracts about the scourge of porn. “Greed, according to Scripture, is displeasing to God and destructive to mankind. Pornography and greed feed upon each other.”

What’s worse, at least from the perspective of a Scripturally-impaired heathen like me, is the revelation porn “threatens Western society as we know it.”

“Men and women are socially, economically and politically free only where they have been freed from addictive forces of evil,” CCV reports. “Pornography is one of the most vicious of those forces.”

Man, this porn stuff sounds worse than those shitbirds from ISILSIS, or whatever their fucking name is this week.

You know, the more I read about porn and what it is doing to destroy civilization, the more it seems like a good idea to grab my trusty hatchet, top off a few Molotov Cocktails and make a beeline for the nearest Hustler Hollywood.

Just as porn addicts are entirely powerless against the appeal of the violent fantasies inspired by the savage pornography they watch, maybe Hapner simply couldn’t resist the clarion call to action from the likes of CCV and Stop Porn Culture.

Or maybe the guy is just a nut.

As his family said in a statement released after his arrest, Hapner “has suffered from mental illness for many years.” They go on to note the “mental health system in this country is broken.”

On the one hand, this seems like a very reasonable explanation: No individual porn critic or anti-porn organization can be held responsible for the actions of a guy like Hapner, because his actions arise from personal mental health problems, not the external influence of their expression.

Of course, if we are to accept this logic, we also have to accept the possibility rapists aren’t really driven to rape because porn has influenced them to do so. We already know this isn’t the case however, because wise, insightful, moral, intellectually honest, upstanding people like Dines and Burress have made it abundantly clear porn causes rape — and clearly these are two people who would never overstate their case, intentionally misread the law or otherwise mislead the public in order to make their point.

That being the case, this might be a good time for brick-and-mortar adult business owners to invest in a new sprinkler system — and maybe some ax-proof windows, while they’re at it.