LOUISVILLE, Ky. — from www.wlky.com – Louisville is known for a lot of things. Whether it’s horse racing, bourbon or basketball, the city often scores national and worldwide attention.

But the ‘Ville now has another distinction: It ranks No. 1 as the city most likely to search for obscene material online, at least according to BusinessInsider.com, which used Google Trends for a 2008 study.

According to their math, Louisville has the greatest percentage of people searching for naughty words online.

WLKY spoke with some who believe the math is correct, and others who said we’ll need more than just one study before we should call Louisville obscene.

“You want to be number one in a lot of different things, but you certainly don’t want to be number one for obscene searches across the entire country,” said Bryan Wickens, president of Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana.

Wickens is using his radio show to talk about the study.

“If you live in a community where you’re number one in obscene searches then the argument would be you have a low community standard and it’s going to be harder to convict anybody for distribution of obscenity,” he said.

He believes Louisville did not get this dubious honor overnight.

“Back in 2004, around when rock got started, there was an expert that came to the community and it was stated then that Louisville was in the top 5 worse places in the country when it comes to the number of clusters of adult businesses,” Wickens said. “Even as those may go away we certainly have what’s left behind.”

In the past five years, he admits, the number of adult businesses has dwindled in Louisville, while online use of pornography has quickly taken its place.

“It can begin very subtly, but it gets to some really seedy places and certainly one of the ones most troubling for us is when children start being victimized,” said Tony Gore of Southeast Christian Church.

“When I first discovered pornography many years ago, if you wanted it, you had to go to some sleazy bookstore,” said Mike Johnston, director of media relations for Pure Life Ministries, a treatment center for sex addicts. “Your local pastor might be concerned about who might see him walking into that place or the local businessman or local father. Today, that local pastor, the businessman, the father, they’re sitting at home at night or in their living room and no one knows what they’re getting involved in.”

Law enforcement officers fighting online crime said the study may reflect the growing problem they’ve seen with online predators and child pornography, with most of the child porn searches coming from homes in the outlying suburban areas of Louisville.

But as for the study calling Louisville the most obscene city, the mayor’s office refused to even grant us an interview, saying they question the credibility of the study.

Donna Russow, a family and marriage counselor, agrees.

“It’s only one study and it always worries me when I only see one study at one point in time,” she said. “I would want a study that was more stringent, that really had some scientific reliability and validation before I’d say Louisville ranks as the most obscene city.”

But Wickens said whether a study says it or not, real people are feeling the effects of what obscenity can do to families.

“I’ve had wives come up to say they’ve almost lost their husbands who were caught up in a secret world that they knew nothing about and didn’t know what they were involved in,” he said. “Marriages destroyed, guys that have lost jobs. But the most heartbreaking ones without a doubt is when I hear of someone that’s gotten themselves going into this dark, dark world until they did act out and hurt a precious, little child and there have been many nights that I have gone home and cried.”

“My thoughts, my attention, my focus, my drive. It was suddenly becoming centered on Internet porn,” said Dave, who turned to online pornography thinking it would be a quick fix for his marital problems.

But when the fix became a daily addiction, it created even more problems. As his secret came out, his picture-perfect family was torn apart.

“Hearing mom and dad fight and seeing mom crying on the bedroom floor, yeah, it’s done a lot of damage,” he said. “Hearing your 3-year-old daughter, after you’ve been gone for three months, every time she sees a plane in the sky, she says, ‘Daddy coming home soon?’ It hurts, it hurts a lot.”

“It just leads to financial problems, emotional problems and even the children being exposed to what their father is doing,” said Jeff Colon, the president of Pure Life Ministries, said in the past several years, he’s seen more men like Dave developing an addiction to cyber sex.

He said some of those men — and a growing number of women — who may have been too embarrassed to go to adult stores can now access a seemingly endless supply online.

“Whether it’s one day, five days, 500 days, the longer I believe you’re in it, the harder it is to walk away,” Dave said.

“I know there’s a cynical response to some of these stories,” Johnston said. “People look at them, they listen to people describing what their families, what their life is like and they think, ‘What is wrong with these people? It’s just a little bit of porn. What is the big deal?”

Johnston said that attitude isn’t surprising, because most people don’t see the impact first-hand.

“What you hear in the stories is things begin to change, their personalities begin to change, trust is depreciated in their marriages, their children begin to see a change in their fathers, and I’m hoping some who are just starting down this path realize there could be consequences to this that I haven’t thought of,” he said.

While some counselors warn about the consequences of porn on families, they’re now also concerned about the potential impact of social networking sites.

An internet research company, Hit wise dot com, said while searches for porn have dropped from 20 percent a decade ago to 10 percent now, visits to social networking sites, like Facebook, are climbing.

“It is the new way of connecting where as porn may be very impersonal, detached, desensitized way of connecting,” Russow said. “I think social networking can, if it’s handled properly, be a much more real way of connecting, so I think that’s a good thing.”

“I don’t believe that’s true, that it’s killing the porn,” Colon said. “I think it’s just taking another avenue.”

“I do know from personal experience and from the experience of what we see men coming to us looking for help on this issue, I very seriously doubt the use of porn is decreasing on the Internet,” Johnston said.

Dave has taken a spiritual approach to staying away from online porn or anything else that could lead him to the possibility of losing his wife and family.

“A glimpse of any of that can just send me spiraling back down, and I know I can’t afford that and my family cannot afford that,” he said.

That study was done in 2008. Is Louisville still on the most obscene list using Google Trends?

We plugged in the same obscene words Thursday, and Louisville is still No. 1 using one of the search words, and in the top 10 cities with only two of the other six words, which, again, we can’t post on the Internet.