the gate

The Church seems to suffer from multiple-personality disorder when it comes to Halloween . . . it’s evil / it’s not evil / turn off your lights and hide / have a fall festival / hallelujah, free candy! / etc. Who’s right, and what’s it really all about?

Justin Holcomb has a good post (and this gory picture) on the Resurgence blog. He writes, “Why did Martin Luther nail his famous 95 Theses to the Wittenberg church door on October 31, 1517? He was confronting two religious observances that promoted false saintliness and exploited people’s fear of judgment and purgatory. There’s a curious connection between Halloween and Reformation Day, and it’s more than just proximity on the calendar.” (click here to read the rest)

Then, at the Life2gether blog, Doug Wolter quotes Michael Patton:

I can’t believe I am going to say this but, WWJD? Really, what would Jesus do? Can you see it? Jesus with his lights turned off on Halloween? That would be the Jesus history never knew. That would be the Jesus of western fundamentalism. The one who is not a friend of sinners and tax gatherers. The Jesus that was never accused of being a drunkard. The Jesus who looked from a distance at the wedding of Cana waiting for the sinners to wipe the dust off their feet before he talked to them. The Jesus who saw a child dressed up as a Ghost and said, “I can’t take this anymore. It is not worth it. Give me that stone so that I can turn it into bread.”

Mark Young, my friend and former missions prof at DTS (now the president of Denver Seminary), used to talk about this in his missions 101 class. Oh the shame of all of us students who turned off the light. We left the class crying looking for little witches and ghosts to hug. His thesis: Christians are not Christians on Halloween. Not because they have compromised and participated, but precisely because they don’t participate. The one day of the year where children (”Permit them to come to me…” Mark 10:14) were attempting to come to us and we shut the door and turn off the lights.
(click here to read it all)

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I was reading an LA Times article on personhood and abortion. (It’s a good article.)

In the middle of the article is this statement:

“I don’t believe that just because we will not get enough votes in an election that we should not do this. I don’t recall Martin Luther King checking the polls to see if he was right on civil rights.”
- Keith Mason

Yup. Majority opinion (on anything) is not God — nor is my opinion, or yours. Knowing who is Lord sure alleviates a lot of confusion.

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have you read/heard obama’s speech given to the school kids today (this was written before the speech aired - i read the text of the speech instead here)?

i’m getting a little irritated at all the right-wing conservatives that immediately assumed that this speech was going to be a communist democratic manifesto of some kind, as if the white house was going to broadcast subliminal messages to abort babies and give them control of health care.

i grew just as weary of the left-wing liberal ”W” haters that immediately looked for a gun rack or a war/oil conspiracy under every rock.

at the end of the day, we need to objective people in our politics.  after all, our politics do not define who we are, our faith in Jesus and our belonging to His family do.

i’m not a big obama fan, but i’m TOTALLY down with this speech.  play it for your kids, bump it over the school loudspeakers.  print it out and make it assigned reading for crying out loud.  our kids need to be educated, and they need to be inspired to stay the course.

chill out for a second crying lady and give obama a chance. 

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Craigslist has responded to the pressure to change their erotic services section. I had posted about this previously here and here.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said, “Craigslist’s erotic services section had become nothing more than an Internet brothel.”

Attorney Daniel Gallagher and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal are skeptical as to whether this promise is real or only a ploy to reduce the pressure.

Read the article here.

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Craigslist facilitates slavery and other crimes . . . brazenly!!

Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, refuses to close the erotic section despite the fact that it is one of the primary U.S. hubs of slavery, pedophilia, trafficking and prostitution.

Greg Collier, CEO of craigslist alternative Geebo.com, says:

On a daily basis “erotic services” posts are published and responded to via Craigslist. Posts go live on Craigslist within 15 minutes, leaving zero room for Craigslist management to review and revoke possible illegal or dangerous postings. This oversight, or rather laziness, is largely to blame for gross amounts of child pornography, prostitution, human trafficking, drug sales, stolen merchandise, identity theft, real estate scams and murder taking place across the United States.

Craigslist lacks a system of checks and balances that provides users with the degree of safety they deserve. Flagging, Craigslist’s joke of content monitoring, is nothing more than a feel-good tool for the site’s management to claim that they are taking precautionary measures. Obviously, they have failed. More times than not user complaints are answered by an auto-responder, not a staff member. Conversely, those posts truly in need of flagging and removal go undisturbed. (link)

Thursday, April 23, a major East Coast newspaper quoted Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster (pictured here) as saying:

“I would not describe any section of our site as ‘sex related,’” Buckmaster wrote in response to a series of e-mailed questions from the [newspaper].

He acknowledged that Craigslist offers an “erotic services” section that should not include more than “legitimate escort services, sensual massage, exotic dancers, etc.,” but said that offers to exchange sexual favors for money are “strictly prohibited” and removed from the site.

No section sex related?!?! What? The article reports that, “There is no official monitoring of the site other than peer reviewers who can flag posts for illegal or improper content.” Moreover, in that city, the day before the article was published there were more than 150 erotic ads, many of which made openly sex-related offers. I’m not giving the link to the article because of the content of some of those ads that were reported — I refuse to give the link for you to read the smut taken from Craigslist.

The article goes on to state:

Complaints about the site and how it is used for criminal activity had been growing even before the arrest of Markoff. Organizations dedicated to combating child trafficking - selling children for sex - and prostitution, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, had contacted Craigslist with their concerns. The Polaris Project, a nonprofit dedicated to eliminating child trafficking and enslavement, said it viewed Craigslist as one of the largest purveyors of such illegal activities worldwide.

Police efforts to stop illegal activity on Craigslist are “outweighed by the enabling environment,” said Mark P. Lagon, executive director of the Polaris Project and a former ambassador to combat human trafficking for the US State Department.

“We follow people who have been victimized in sex trafficking, and one of the major platforms for sex traffickers these days is Craigslist,” he said.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is calling for the company to take stronger actions to combat pornography, prostitution, and child trafficking in its online classifieds.

In response to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster denying that the site offers anything sex-related, Blumenthal said:

“The fact is, there are prostitution ads and some very flagrant and blatant pornography on that site. I have trouble believing they can say there are no sex-for-hire ads,” he said.

For years, newspapers across the country have been documenting how Craigslist is a hub of slavery, pedophilia, trafficking and prostitution.

For example, Underage Prostitutes Marketed On Internet - The Sacramento Bee (link)

From an article in the Los Angeles Daily News:

The approach comes as pimps are getting increasingly sophisticated and harder to bust. They run loose networks across states lines that distribute girls like drugs and set up Internet sex operations that are tough to infiltrate. The result: Teen prostitution has spread to towns across the country, said Michael Langeman, who heads the FBI’s Crimes Against Children unit.

[. . .]

The boyfriend took her to Arizona, made her pose for photos in lingerie and have sex with men who responded to Craigslist ads.

[. . .]

Gladys, a 17-year-old from a Miami suburb, found herself there after she ran away from home to be with a boyfriend. The boyfriend advertised her as a prostitute on Craigslist and threatened to kill her if she didn’t comply. She was shuffled around motels over a two-month period until one of his other “girlfriends” got arrested.

Check out the Craigslist Crime Blotter (click here).

_____________________________________________________________________
Tonight

(CBS) 48 Hours Mystery will broadcast “Craigslist: Classified for Murder?,” a primetime special devoted to the Craigslist murder investigation on Saturday, April 25 at 10 p.m. ET/PT. In addition to examining the crimes and evidence, the program will probe the psyche of accused killer, Philip Markoff.
_____________________________________________________________________

(click the green tab)

_____________________________________________________________________

UPDATE (4/27/09): Should YOU boycott Craigslist? I don’t know. How else do you suggest we fight against the slavery, trafficking, child abuse, rape, and other sex crime that is facilitated there? Do you want to give your time to “policing” the ads placed there? Should you have to?

And . . . if you say you’ll police Craigslist, what about the women and children that are bought and sold, raped, abused, and tortured because you didn’t catch all the adds? You can’t cover all the cities Craigslist covers. All the law enforcement personnel plus all the staff and volunteers working for all the anti-trafficking organizations can’t stop it as long as Craigslist keeps advertising women and children for sale.

Regarding the community policing policy of Craigslist, Trench Reynolds says,

“As far as I’m concerned, that’s like the inmates running the asylum . . . People who are going into Craigslist for illegal activity are not gonna flag ads, because that’s what they are going into there for. And the people looking at Craigslist to, say, buy a couch aren’t going into the erotic services section so they can flag illegal ads.”

I think he’s right. I also think Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster know that.

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Related posts:
Pray Against Sex Trafficking/Slavery
sex + money
Wow . . . Just, Wow!
Freedom Day 2009
Sex Trafficking In America
Human Trafficking: Modern-Day Slavery

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some of us attended the “one voice to end slavery” event that steve wrote about recently.  i missed most of it myself, but i attended a workshop regarding gender issues as related to human trafficking.  pretty eye opening, but just the tip of the iceberg.

did you know that over 14,000 humans are trafficked into the U.S. each year into lives of sexual or domestic slavery, servile marriages or other forms of slavery?  just last week, a woman in my own city was arrested for running a prostitution house in another nearby city.  last year, 39 humans in the O.C. were freed from slavery.  and from affluent communities mind you, not the ghettos. 

i think about my city.  MY city.  endless rows of $15 massage joints, cash only businesses as far as the eye can see.  how many of those faces are here against their will?  granted, a large part of our immigrant community is here by choice, no doubt.  but perhaps there are some of the 14K peppered in those massage parlors and nail salons.

it’s amazing what you see when your eyes are open.

open your eyes…

www.photogenx.net/sexandmoney (Sex + Money - A Global Search For Human Worth)
http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2008/ (Trafficking in Persons Report - 2008)
www.freetheslaves.net
http://www.photogenx.net/sexandmoney/getinvolved.php  (a list of other interesting sites)
http://lahumantrafficking.org/  (l.a. county unity coalition)

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It’s a term I doubt I would have ever thought of, but as soon as I read it, it made sense. Not everybody likes social networking sites — including some who use them.

“Being exposed to details, from someone’s painful breakup to what they had for breakfast — and much more sordid details than that — feels like voyeurism,” says the 31-year-old public relations executive in Washington, D.C. “I’m less concerned with protecting my privacy, and more concerned at the ethics of a ‘human zoo’ where others’ lives, and often serious problems, are treated as entertainment.”
– Alex Slater, on his decision to dump his Twitter account and strip his Facebook page to a minimum, in an article entitled “Are you a twit if you don’t want to Twitter?” (click to read it)

I’m not throwing stones — just thought it was an interesting point of view.

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there was a great famine in samaria america; and behold, they besieged it, until a donkey’s head was sold for eighty shekels of silver dollars, and a fourth of a kab of dove’s dung for five shekels of silver dollars. as the king president of israel america was passing by on the wall a woman cried out to him, saying, “help, my lord, O king president!” he said, “if the Lord does not help you, from where shall I help you? from the threshing floor, or from the wine press?” and the king president said to her, “what is the matter with you?” and she answered, ”this woman said to me, ‘give your son that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’ ”so we boiled my son and ate him; and i said to her on the next day, ‘give your son, that we may eat him’; but she has hidden her son.”  (2 kings 6:25-29)

america’s famine is so harsh, i ate my son yesterday.  now i’m angry at steve because i let him eat G’s leg because he promised that today he’d be cooking ben up for dinner.  but i heard he stashed ben up in seattle somewhere.  what a jerk!

** tongue WAAAY in cheek **

the famine in samaria was so harsh that they had resorted to eating their own children.  how horrible is that?  somehow, our economic situation seems trivial at best.  perhaps our descent will take us very deep, but we’re a long way from this level of desperation.  we need a bit of a perspective realignment.

now, i’m trying to remember a time where i have had a conversation about the economic status of the U.S.A. that has involved a concerted effort on my part to offer hope.  i share my faith regularly, but with this particular topic i get caught up in policy and whatevers.  i have even had times to share about real need from my experiences in india.  but i am becoming convinced that the Church (capital “C”) needs to take this opportunity to present hope.  these are hopeless times.  people need hope, not a stable stock market.

will you join me in reminding people that amidst the trials that israel faced, God remained faithful to His people?

psalm 23, although it is about a different topic, seems very applicable to me right now. 

even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, i fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. (psalm 23:4)

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I found this encouraging. Gallup is reporting that 58% of Americans disapprove of the executive order to fund overseas family-planning groups that provide abortions or offer abortion counseling. Only 35% approve. Click the link to read more.

(HT: moralaccountability.com)

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i like this kid.  he’s showing serious leadership and character.  i hope G is this strong.  are you?

www.nocussing.com

authors notes:  video link fixed, and did you notice that this kid is from SOUTH PASADENA!?

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