WASHINGTON – During a two-hour presentation inside the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center, a panel of anti-porn activists urged Congress to crack down on pornography, impressing and alarming a small group of Congressional interns and junior staff members. The politicians in training had been assigned to attend the session while their bosses debated far more important national issues, like capping airline bag fees at $4.50.

“Don’t make the mistake of interpreting my boss’s absence at today’s discussion as a lack of interest in the topic,” said Chris Whitman, an intern on the staff of Tom Bufordshire [R-Kans.], chairman of the Select Committee on Finding Fault with Anything Ever Done by Anyone Named Clinton.

“Representative Bufordshire would love to have been here today to hear all the shocking evidence of pornography’s detrimental effects on its viewers,” Whitman continued, “but as a member of the House, he has all sorts of duties and responsibilities to attend to. In today’s case, his presence on the Hill was needed to support a crucially important renaming of a post office in Salina, Kans., as well as sponsor a new measure to forbid the wearing of pantsuits by women who hold public office.”

With more than 75 of the room’s 125 seats dedicated to members of the media, many interested people had to be turned back at the door, according to event organizer Abigail Cuthbert, president of the Ray City chapter of Free Righteous United Intelligent Trustworthy Caring Americans Killing Exploitation (FRUITCAKE).

“We were very grateful to see the immense interest in hearing from our panel of esteemed experts, even if no actual representatives or senators were in attendance,” Cuthbert said. “We know they were here in spirit — just like in the past they’ve presumably had vigorous debates-in-spirit about things like invading Iraq and the wisdom of granting the executive branch nearly unfettered authority to prosecute the ongoing war on terror, or war on Islamic extremism, or war on backwards-ass fascist dirtbags, or whatever we’re calling it these days.”

In a statement announcing his support for the event, sponsoring legislator Charles Weedley [R-WTF] said “important steps already have been taken to protect American families from gun control, healthcare and unemployment benefits, but substantial work remains to be done, given the prevalence of and easy access by children to internet porn, demeaning, Godless mathematics and the inappropriate, unfounded, sacrilegious musings of Bill Nye, the so-called ‘Science Guy.’”

Speakers at the event included Dr. Gail Dense, author of Pornography: It Will Kill Everyone You Love if You Don’t Buy and Faithfully Heed the Warnings Contained in this Book; clinical psychologist Dr. Marianne Playedum from the University of Southern Northeastern State College at Los Angeles A&M, and Richard Goodnews, president of Americans for Being All Up in Your Shit for No Good Reason (DICKS).

“Peer-reviewed research and extensive clinical testing have proven pornography to be 72 percent more addictive than Minecraft, 22 percent more harmful than smoking banana peels and 81 percent more troublesome to grandmothers than teenagers walking down the street wearing black clothing,” Playedum reported, reading from what appeared to be a Village Inn menu. “Most alarmingly, a strong correlation has been shown between frequent viewing of pornography and severe, even untreatable, underwear staining.”

Dense, drawing on firsthand observations, conversations with “pornography survivors” and a variety of historically reliable quasi-mythological sources, made several of the session’s most stunning and compelling points, especially when it came to the immense size and staggering profitability of the modern porn industry.

“The online porn industry by itself is making more than $700 billion per nanosecond,” Dense said, citing the Mayan calendar. “At this rate, Larry Flynt will own the entire galaxy by approximately noon tomorrow — unless we act now, decisively, militarily, unilaterally, vigorously and without further consideration to nuke the San Fernando Valley, South Florida, Charlie Sheen’s house and Budapest.”

Nodding in approval with Dines, Goodnews said while the instantaneous collateral elimination of millions of innocent people would be “obviously unfortunate,” it’s preferable to the alternative.

“We’re not just talking about the individual mortal souls of the people being lost to porn addiction,” Goodnews said. “With the global reach and irresistible lure of smut, the whole of humanity is at risk. If we don’t act right now, we might inadvertently forestall the Rapture, which really is about the only salvation left to us in light of the porn pandemic we now face.”

Whitman said while he was “somewhat unconvinced” when it came to the purely scripture-based proclamations served up by Goodnews during the discussion, ultimately he was persuaded by the “solid science” offered by Dense and Playedum.

“Anybody can sit up there and say porn is destroying the world, but at the end of the day it’s just more words,” Whitman said. “But Dr. Dense and Dr. Playedum didn’t just have words; they also had charts and graphs. At one point, they even used Powerpoint! Seriously — what more do the skeptics want from these experts?”

The bottom line Playedum wanted attendees to take away from the event, she said, was the “immediacy and urgency” of the global porn crisis.

“Pornography is a problem we can no longer afford to ignore,” she insisted. “And I mean that literally. I simply can’t keep purchasing my husband new underwear at this rate. It’s just insane.”