(Formerly under the Devotions tab, originally published 4/19/22)
Ephesians 2:10; “He has created us in Christ Jesus to live lives filled with good works that he has prepared for us to do.”
It seems so simple; I am crafted, you are crafted, we are crafted with a good to-do list prepared by God through Christ Jesus! So, let’s do it! Let’s concentrate on doing good, loving God and each other. What we don’t know are the things that hurt us.
It is said that roughly half of trafficked humans wind up in pornographic images. They are not actors. They are not paid. They are not having fun. They are not excited or enjoying it. For them it is one of the terms of their slavery. They are enslaved by us! The images, which we feel are safe to watch privately, are lies. They are lies that we hunger for. They are lies that we pay for. They are lies which we compound by hiding them from our spouses, our families, everyone.
Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, Snapchat, Tinder, Reddit, whatever. Many of them are lies to set us up to make more slaves. If I only knew.
Read the excerpt that I noted below. Let it sink in. Pray about the scripture today and commit to your partner to do the hard work of doing good, and forsake the horrors of the slavery that is going on around us.
Recommended Citation:
Catharine A. MacKinnon, Pornography as Trafficking, 26 MICH. J. INT’L L. 993 (2005). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjil/vol26/iss4/1
“As with all prostitution, the women and children in pornography are, in the main, not there by choice but because of a lack of choices. They usually “consent” to the acts only in the degraded and demented sense of the word (common also to the law of rape) in which a person who despairs at stopping what is happening, sees no escape, has no real alternative, was often sexually abused before as a child, may be addicted to drugs, is homeless, hopeless, is often trying to avoid being beaten or killed, is almost always economically desperate, acquiesces in being sexually abused for payment, even if, in most instances, it is payment to someone else. Many are children; most enter the industry as children’10. Most pornography is, in pure John Millerese, “made by slaves”11.
10. See The Minneapolis Hearings, IN HARM’S WAY, supra note 2, at 114 (testimony of T.S.).
11. John Miller is the current head of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons in the U.S. Department of State. See http://www.state.gov/g/tip.
There are so many important Bible references to consider, such as: the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, the marriage bed is not to be defiled, if a man looks at a woman with lust he has committed adultery, think only about the things that are pure and holy, and so on. They are great and critical pieces to a complex problem, which is this addiction. Let’s add consideration to the victim on the other side of the addiction; I DON’T WANT TO TRAFFIC WOMEN OR CHILDREN! May the Lord help us! We are here to help as well.
Joe Fabean
*All Scripture from the Message paraphrase, 2002