The Politics of Parental Web Filters

For the last week or so I've been sending emails back and forth with Trend Micro Systems. They're the company behind some of the most prominent internet security filters available – filters designed to protect computers from web-based assaults and to protect minors from inappropriate web content.

The dialogue began when I requested to know what their specific criteria was for determining what websites they block – a request motivated by an email that was forwarded to me from a frustrated Trend Micro client who couldn't figure out why Abort73 was being blocked as a "Hate / Violence / Racism" site.

After the first few exchanges, I had the strong impression that whoever was on the other end of the emails was either a machine or someone with an extremely thin grasp of the English language (or both). The responses were vague and disjointed, they communicated almost nothing, and always ended with something like, "if we don't hear back from you within 24 hours, we'll trust this has resolved your issue."

I continued to ask for more details and was eventually told that the case had been reviewed by their technicians, and that I needed to clean out my IE cache to see the latest results (as if I were using Internet Explorer). Not having access to the program myself, I went ahead and downloaded a trial version of Smart Surfing for Mac to see what I could find out.

After installing and configuring the default protection filter (which is supposed to block websites that are not age appropriate for teenagers), I saw that sure enough, Abort73 was being blocked, under the category of "Sex".  I switched to both the "high" and "low" filter presets and learned that Abort73 was blocked at every level, from child all the way to "mature" teenager.

From here, I did some research on the "Sex" category and found the following disclaimer included in the description explaining what kind of sites are blocked in this category:

"In addition, this category [blocks] sites that provide information about abortion, describe abortion procedures, offer help in obtaining or avoiding abortion, or provide information on the effects, or lack thereof, of an abortion."

Fair enough. By that criteria, it became very obvious to me why Abort73 was being blocked. We provide information about abortion, we describe abortion procedures, we offer help in avoiding abortion, and we provide information on the effects of abortion. It's almost a clean sweep.

What was much less clear to me was why, with that standard in place, the Planned Parenthood website was not being blocked – at any level. Even at the the most extreme security setting, which is supposed to filter out any sites not appropriate for children, Planned Parenthood gets through – as does NARAL (Pro-Choice America) – as does the NOW page on abortion.

And while Abort73 is tagged with the "Sex" label, this was the most prominent headline on Planned Parenthood's website the day I visited:"SAFER SEX". Beneath that was an article tagged this way: "Fashion designer and icon Jeremy Scott takes groundbreaking fashion to the bedroom." The homepage links down the right side of their page included "Abortion", "Birth Control", "Emergency Contraception", and "Sexually Transmitted Diseases". By typing your zip code into a box on the home page, you get a list of local abortion clinics with maps, directions and phone numbers. This was all accessible to me with the child "filter" on. Maybe I'm biased, but one could argue that the Planned Parenthood website deals with both sex and abortion.

To be fair, I also noticed that the National Right to Life website, and Priests for Life website were not being blocked either. After raising these apparent inconsistencies in my continued correspondence (and weathering another round of generalities), I finally received a relatively thorough explanation as to why all these sites are, in fact, correctly categorized. Here's the reason:

"[The] majority of their contents [sic] falls under a different category and not solely discussing [sic] Abortion."

To further elaborate, the email stated that the websites for Planned Parenthood, NOW and the National Right to Life Committee are primarily "Political Sites advocating non-mainstream social or political viewpoints". Priests for Life is a "Religion Site that promotes/offers/sells means/information on accepted religion that are seen as not link [sic] to malign/demonic/atheistic [sic]". The NARAL website was simply classified as "unrated" (I wonder who you have to know to be left "unrated"?). So there you have it – as clear as mud.

With their assurance that everything is as it should me, and with my request for reclassification denied, my conversation with Trend Micro has come to an end. It ended as I expected it would, but as a parent and a web master, I come away a little wiser for the wear. I'm reminded that parental web controls are a poor substitute for wisdom and discernment. I'm reminded that external constraints can sometimes keep good things out and bad things in. I'm reminded that we don't always compete on level playing fields, and I'm reminded that the power of God far exceeds the power of internet filters.

Abandoned in Brazil; Aborted in America

I got an email this weekend from a missionary at a Brazilian orphanage. He says sometimes the kids in the orphanage fantasize about what it would have been like to be born in America. He tells them not to wish for that, because in America, "they probably wouldn't have made it past the first trimester." Abortion on demand is against the law in Brazil. So instead of winding up in abortion clinic dumpsters, "the unwanted children are alive and well in adoptive homes or in orphanages". To illustrate that it's better to be abandoned in Brazil than aborted in America, he made this video. It's worth a watch! 

5 Reasons to Engage

Abort73 did three LOVE THE LEAST (LTL) events this past weekend in Southern California. Numbers wise, they were the biggest LTL's we've done, and I was extremely encouraged by the feedback we received throughout. At every stop, I prefaced my remarks about Abort73 by outlining why, for many years, I believed that abortion was not something Christians should be particularly concerned about. Through high school and college, my thinking went like this:

• Abortion is a political issue, and political engagement does not move the gospel forward.
• Abortion is a moral issue, and it is not our job to moralize an unbelieving nation.
• Abortion is symptomatic of a much bigger problem. We shouldn't focus on the symptom, we should focus on the problem and let the symptoms take care of themselves. Transform the heart; transform the behavior.

That was my rationale for leaving abortion by the wayside. Obviously, I have since come to a very different opinion, and I articulated my philosophical shift by listing five things I was not taking into account. Because a number of people asked me for that list again afterwards, I figured it would be worth providing online as well. So here they are. Five reasons why the objections I previously held should henceforth be ignored.

1. Abortion is not a political issue, primarily. It's a people issue – a love your neighbor issue.
   
2. Combatting abortion does not aim at making abortion-vulnerable women more moral; it aims as saving the life of an innocent child.
   
3. We are not trying to force a foreign morality on an unbelieving world. The morality is already in place. The world knows, intrinsically, that it's wrong to kill a baby. They're just not fully aware that this is exactly what abortion is doing.
   
4. Seventy percent of aborting women in the United States identify themselves as Christians, which means there can be as much confusion inside the church about abortion as there is outside the church. For lack of clear teaching on abortion, heart transformation is not necessarily leading to behavior transformation.
   
5. The apostle Paul commands us to "expose deeds of darkness." Solomon commands us to "rescue those being led away to the slaughter." James commands us to care for the oppressed, and Jesus says whatever we did not do for the least of these among us, we did not do for him. In America today, I can think of no group of human beings more qualified to wear the "least of these" label than abortion-vulnerable children. It is their very "leastness", their helplessness and dependence, which has become the primary rationale for their destruction – and according to the latest data, more than 3,300 of the most innocent and helpless members of the human community are killed every single day in this country, not through a hurricane, not through an earthquake, not through a flood, but through the intentional violence of abortion. 

For everyone who joined us this past weekend at LOVE THE LEAST, thank you so much for coming out. For everyone else, we're plotting where the next round of events will take place. Stay tuned...

Political Obsession. Practical Neglect.

Last week, I posted a link to Bryan Kemper's new book, Social Justice Begins in the Womb, on Abort73's Facebook page. Shortly thereafter, an ideological opponent commented that, "Unfortunately for your crowd..., social justice usually ends after the womb as well."

That got me thinking about the disconnect that exists between the church's perceived relationship to abortion and the church's actual relationship to abortion. Despite the fact that abortion is barely mentioned in most churches, the perception seems to exist in the world that abortion (and gay marriage) are all that Christians care about. This is an absurd and tragic mischaracterization – which raises the question, how did we get here? How is it that we have a church that is largely silent about abortion and a world that seems to think the church's highest ambition is to eliminate abortion?

I had the totally unexpected privilege of having lunch with John Piper last Wednesday. As we talked about Abort73 and the history of his own involvement in the abortion issue, he made a comment that speaks to this present dilemma. He said that in his mind, the thing that killed off the rescue movement more than anything was the fact that "you couldn't control the nut bags". He spoke of talking to crowds of up to 300 rescuers, urging them to remain calm and respectful during their arrests, reminding them that the American public responds to silent suffering, not self-righteous tirades (it wasn't the rage of the Malcolm X'rs that gained the sympathy of a largely indifferent nation – it was the steadfast humility and love of the Dr. King's). And while the vast majority of participants heeded Pastor John's counsel, there were invariably a few who didn't, and those (of course) are the ones that wind up on the news. Almost without fail, you can characterize them in four ways: Angry. White. Middle-aged. Male – men who count the giving of offense as the highest spiritual honor. For the last 20+ years, that has been the reputation the pro-life movement has been trying to live down. Progress has been made, but the world is reluctant to let it go. It serves them very well.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that those outside the church seem incapable of separating the church itself from the "religious right". If they spent anytime inside a church, they would soon see how silly it is to classify most Christians as being obsessive about abortion. But since their opinion comes from the outside, they've equated church priorities with conservative, political priorities (where abortion is certainly on the agenda).

It would be one thing if these false assumptions never infiltrated the doors of the church, but the damage hasn't just been from the outside in. As the social justice movement has gained tremendous traction in the evangelical church, abortion has largely been left out of the equation. In trying to live down the erroneous belief that Christians "only care about fetuses", we have become a church that cares even less about fetuses. And because abortion has been left off the educational agenda of so many churches, we have a nation of Christians with a thoroughly incomplete understanding of how solid the secular case against abortion actually is – which yields a general reluctance to challenge the world's thinking on the subject of abortion.

I haven't read Bryan's book yet, but it's title alludes to this fact that as the social justice movement has taken off in the church, abortion-vulnerable children have largely been left by the wayside. Having spent a great deal of time at Christian music festivals over the last two years, I see in them a microcosm of the church's overall reluctance to take on abortion. When a Christian band takes a vocal and public stand against poverty, disease or sex trafficking, the world celebrates their compassion. When they take a vocal and public stand against abortion, which almost none of them are doing, the world might condemn them as hateful bigots. So it is in the church. Just as standing against abortion may cost Christian bands some customers, standing against abortion may cost Christians some friends (and cost churches some members). That can be a hard pill to swallow, and as long as there is confusion about the severity of what abortion is actually doing (and how often!), we may even pat ourselves on the back for accepting the censure of the world and embracing more politically-correct justice issues.

But as more Christians realize how massive and compelling the case against abortion is, as more Christians come to see abortion as a love your neighbor issue (not as a moral or political issue), and as more pro-life ventures effectively represent the love of Christ, the misconceptions of the world will slowly change. More importanly, the cultural understanding and acceptance of abortion will also change. And lest there be any confusion, I am not arguing that we become what the world accuses us of being: obsessed with abortion and indifferent to the myriad of other human injustices. Rather, I am arguing that we become what we should be: a church that loves people and combats injustice wherever it is found, even and especially when it is an injustice being ignored or celebrated by the world – a church like the one Tim Keller described at the 2006 Desiring God Conference, of which the world says: "I don't like their approach to abortion, I don't like their approach to homosexuality, [but] if they left our city, we'd have to raise taxes [because] they're pressing so much of their heart and so much of their value into this city." He then asks us in reference to a world of unbelievers, "Do they know we love them?" And I ask the same question in reference to a world of abortion-vulnerable women and children. Do they know we love them?

Looking Ahead to 2010 (Spending)

Last week, I outlined the coming shift in our handling of T-shirt sales – a move necessitated by the disproportionate amount of money we've had tied up in inventory. Today I want to talk about the 2010 changes that relate to our general spending. In an effort to get our financial legs under us again after a rather difficult year, we've made two significant cuts. One, we will not be exhibiting at any music festivals this year. Two, we will not be bringing back Jeff Jones as Director of Ministry Outreach. The first decision was a fairly easy one (particularly in light of increasing exhibit fees and decreasing attendance figures). The second decision was much more difficult (and more personal). Coming out of the summer, we knew that if something dramatic didn't change, Jeff's continued employment would not be sustainable. We just weren't getting enough regular income to support two salaries. In response, we shifted Jeff to almost full-time fundraising, prayed diligently, and were as creative as we knew how to be in soliciting donations. After months of contacting churches and pushing 200/$10 by 2010, we have almost nothing to show for it. Just like us, churches and individuals are struggling to stay afloat, and there's not a whole lot to go around.

God, in his abundant mercy, and limitless provision, is often pleased to sanctify us through seasons of want. It reminds us of how frail and vulnerable we – how utterly dependent we are upon him. And these seasons test us to see whether we're living for God or living for his gifts. Jeff has been very gracious in receiving the news and continues to express confidence in the sovereignty of God – believing the changes ahead will ultimately be good for him and his family. Please pray for them as he seeks his next position, and pray for Abort73 as we seek to be faithful stewards of all God has blessed us with. Our 2010 budget will be up shortly. In the meantime, there is still plenty of time to invest in our work this year. Today, as always, we have much to be thankful for, and I have great expectations for the year ahead. As we pull back, may God be pleased to push us forward!