My last relapse was with images a machine made. No camera, no person, no victim. That is the whole argument for why it should not have counted, and I believed it right up until I felt what it did to me. Same pull. Same shame afterward. Same distance between me and my wife the next morning.
Last week a federal appeals court built a ruling on the half of that I used to believe.
What the court decided
On August 25, 2026, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a case out of Wisconsin. A man named Steven Anderegg was charged with using an AI image generator to produce thousands of sexual images of children, distributing them, sending them to a boy under sixteen, and possessing them.
The court dismissed one of those four charges. The possession count. The other three are still pending against him.
The panel said its hands were tied. Two Supreme Court cases do the tying. Stanley v. Georgia, from 1969, says the government cannot police what a man reads or watches alone inside his own house. Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, from 2002, says sexual images of children made without a real child are not child pornography under the law. Stack those together and you get this.
The judges were not happy about it. They wrote that the 2002 case was decided before anyone could imagine what image generators can do now, and they asked the Supreme Court to look again.
Be accurate when you talk about this, because the version going around the internet is wrong. If you saw a post claiming AI child abuse images are now legal, that is not what happened. Snopes ran a fact check and called the viral version true but stripped of its context. Making this material is still a crime. Sharing it is still a crime. Sending it to a child is still a crime. What the court protected is one man keeping it, alone, where nobody can see.
Get it right, because you do not need to exaggerate it. The narrow version is bad enough.
I used to defend this
I was a libertarian for years. Show me this ruling ten years ago and I would have sided with the court. Not because I liked the material. Because I believed the principle. A man in his own home, hurting nobody, is none of the government's business. That sentence felt clean. It felt like freedom.
It was a lie, and I was the one telling it to myself.
Getting free is what exposed it. When you come out the other side, you can finally look back down the road you walked and see what was actually happening on it. "Hurting nobody" was the story I needed in order to keep going. I was hurting my wife. I was hurting my capacity to be present with my children. I was hurting the man I was supposed to be for the people God gave me. None of that showed up in the room while it was happening. All of it showed up in my house.
That is what my last relapse finally settled for me. Nothing real was involved, and nothing about it was different. Same sin, different delivery truck.
Jesus said a man who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery in his heart. He put the sin inside the man. He did not make it conditional on whether she knew, or whether she was photographed, or whether she existed. Whether your desire goes anywhere outside your marriage is the whole question. The pixels are just the packaging.
So when a court says a fabricated image involves nobody, my answer is that it involves the man looking at it. He is somebody. He has a wife or will have one. He has children or will be around children. He lives on a street with other people's children on it. He does not stay sealed in that room. He comes out and walks around among us carrying whatever he just fed himself.
Say it plainly
What the man in this case was doing is evil. Deliberately generating sexual images of children is not a bad habit or an unfortunate compulsion. It is evil, and I am not going to reach for a softer word because a machine did the rendering.
The reason that matters to a man fighting his own version of this is that lust does not stay where you set it down. It escalates. It goes looking. What satisfied you two years ago does not touch you now, and you already know that, because you have watched it happen to yourself. Every man in this fight is somewhere on a road that runs in a direction. This ruling clears a legal obstacle off one stretch of that road and tells a man there is nothing waiting at the end of it. There is something waiting. There always has been.
Wives and parents who come across this deserve a straight answer about where I stand, so here it is without hedging. I am against this. I am against the behavior, I think the ruling is wrong, and I do not think privacy inside a man's house is a good enough reason to shelter it.
The part that should bother everyone
Here is the argument that does not require you to share one word of my faith.
When investigators find abuse material online, they can work backward from it. The image is evidence. Somewhere there is a real child in a real room, and that picture is the thread you pull to find her. Analysts do this for a living. They identify wallpaper, furniture, school uniforms. They rescue children.
Now flood that haystack. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children started tracking AI-related reports in 2023 and logged about 4,700 that year. In 2024 it was 67,000. By 2025 the category had passed 400,000, including more than 145,000 reports of people using AI tools to alter existing abuse material and over 30,000 reports of people trying to prompt these systems into producing it.
NCMEC also found that its own staff had to label more than 158,000 files as AI-generated, while the tech platforms sending the reports flagged around 11,000. The companies generating the flood are not the ones sorting it.
Every synthetic image has to be examined before it can be set aside. Every hour spent proving a picture is fake is an hour not spent finding the child in the one that is real. Genuine evidence gets buried under artificial garbage, and the children at the bottom of that pile wait longer or never get found at all.
There is one more piece the court's logic misses. NCMEC has pointed out that fully synthetic material is still produced by models trained on photographs of real children. The children are in there. They are just averaged out until you cannot see them anymore.
That is not preaching. That is arithmetic.
This is not finished
The judges did not say this is right. They said they are stuck and asked for help. So it is not settled. The Justice Department has not said whether it will take this to the Supreme Court. Congress can write law that a 2002 decision never anticipated. The STOP CSAM Act is one of the bills moving in that direction right now.
Pray about it. Call your representatives about it. Watch what happens next in this case and do not let it slide past you.
Hear me on one more thing, whoever you are and however early you are in this. I am not writing any of it down at you. I am writing from about ten feet ahead of you on the same road.
Whatever a court decides you are permitted to keep in your house has nothing to do with what it is doing to you. That question got answered long before this ruling and it will be answered the same way long after it.
This is not about what we are allowed to do. It is about walking in purity.