Porn Valley- The piss drinkin', foot suckin', bible quotin' Rod Fontana was a guest on Nick East's KSEX Show, Holy Crap! Thursday night.
Fontana, who's been performing in porn since 1976, has now become a man of the cloth and announced plans that he will be starting a porn ministry.
East asked Fontana what he made of ABC's Prime Time special in which the industry was painted as this entity which can take your soul, leaving you "soul-less."
East, of course, also brought up Fontana's "really, really intense" foot fetish.
"It follows me everywhere, doesn't it?" said Fontana. "But I'm working on that."
In a barrage of opening questions, East also asked Fontana how he reconciles God and religion with what he does for a living.
Fontana replied saying he gets asked that question a lot.
"You have to first presuppose that God does not exist within the porn industry," he continues. "Or that God or Jesus- and Jesus Christ is my Lord and savior- you have to presuppose that those people don't look kindly upon porn stars. Or porn people. I disagree. And when you talk about being soul-less, we all have a soul. And we all make mistakes."
Fontana then referenced the word "sin."
"Any time you use the word sin it has a connotation," he went on to say. "The connotation is evil, bad- you commit a sin, you're going to hell. I'm here to tell you that's not what sin means."
According to Fontana, sin was a term used by Roman archers to indicate they had missed a certain target with their arrows.
"Which means you missed the mark- and Jesus said we all fall short of the glory of God and miss the mark. That is the term for sin. We all come into this existence trying to be better than we are. Trying to be a better person, to be more developed spiritually, to be a whole person. Jesus said it very simply. I didn't come to subvert the law- meaning the old Jewish law- I came to make it better. I came to make it where you can live in abundance, a life of abundance. When you sin all you're doing is hurting yourself."
Addressing the Virginia Tech tragedy, Fontana said people erroneously would call it sin.
"That's not sin," said Fontana. "That's evil. Evil's different than sin. Evil's the absolute absence of light, of love, of humility, of loving your neighbor. It's the absolute opposite. Take evil and turn it backwards. What do you have? L-i-v-e."
Fontana admitted that he has some serious problems with a lot of the Old Testament.
"But Jesus had one commandment," he said. "He says love your fellow man as you love yourself. If you do that everything else will fall into place and you'll grow."
East asked Fontana if he were still in the seminary.
"I've kind of passed that," replied Fontana. "What I am now- after May- I'm an Episcopal[ian]. And what will happen I'm going through this process right now for the ministry because that's what you have to do in my denomination. Beyond that I will be admitted into the Deaconate which is basically the Diocese of Los Angeles. What my task will be to do will be to administer or preach to a specific community. And my particular need I feel is for the porn community. And that's what I want to do."
Fontana described the various churches he passed on the way to KSEX and wondered how many of them would wholeheartedly allow "our people" into their church and accept them for what they are and not be judgmental.
"I can't even say in my own denomination that they would," stated Fontana. "But I think they're a little more tolerant because of what they've had to go through. So my task will be to work for the Diocese and administer just for, specifically, the porn community.
"Ultimately I would hope to be ordained as full priest and issue the sacraments and all that," Fontana continued. "But for now my calling, my preaching, my ministry is for them."
Based on Fontana's experience, East wondered if the average, normal church goer would look down on the people in the porn industry and feel that they're actually better than the people in porn.
"Superficially they would look down," Fontana agreed. "And they would feel that they'e better but in their heart they would know that they weren't."
Using Jesus as his ongoing reference point, Fontana said if you looked at Christ's ministry, the one example that stands out and touches him so deeply was the story about his keeping a woman from being stoned for adultery by commanding those without sin to cast the first stone.
"He looked at the woman and said who is here to condemn you? And she said no one. And he said neither do I."
East said that always sounded to him like a confession on Christ's part.
"That he actually felt that he had sinned as well."
"His whole point though is we're all with sin," said Fontana. "And no one has the right to judge or condemn anyone for anybody else's behavior."
"Fortgetting porn and sex, I miss the mark every day. I miss it terribly."
In that situation, Fontana could think of a heated reaction to a traffic incident by flipping another driver the bird.
Fontana was also of the opinion that the people in the hypothetical church who would look down on porn stars probably sin worse in their own lives.
Fontana hopes that he'll be able to build a congregation in a couple of months once he's admitted into the Deaconate.
"We'll see what happens," he said. "We'll just have to structurally figure out how we're going to do it."
Without naming names, Fontana went on to say that he doesn't advocate what the XXXChurch does.
"They allegedly minister to the porn community," Fontana continued. "What they do is they suck you in by saying we want to be your friends and your buddy. Then they lower the boom on you and talk about how bad you are and how sinful you are. I don't want to do that. I'm not here to judge anybody. The Lord and savior is not here to judge anybody. We're here to spread love and I mean spiritual love. There are people hurting in our business and they're hurting in ways you wouldn't think. They're hurting in their soul. They're hurting because people don't accept them.
"People use them. People profit by them. People partake in what they have to offer but they don't give anything back and there's no love there."
Going back to when he got in the business, Fontana described it as an entirely different era for its free love advocacy.
"Things were different then- when I showed up on a set there was a lot more comaraderie. There was a lot more good feeling. It was communal in nature. People gave to each other. If somebody needed a place to stay, you crashed at their house. If you needed food, they gave it to you. Now the business is so cutthroat. That's what bothers me now is how people are used as fodder and used up. It's all about the money."
Because porn people tend to party on Saturday nights, East suggested Fontana hold his services later in the day on Sunday. East also said that he'd love to get some people from the XXXChurch on his show in the future.
