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.

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This is easily the most thorough and comprehensive website with abortion facts and tools to help the

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Abort73.com has definitely informed me on the foundations of abortion as well as given me ideas and

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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! 

Last week I spoke about abortion to a group of about 80 kids, 7th-12th grade. I played one of your v

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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. 

I agree with everything that Abort73 stands for. Abortion hurts me so deeply. I am 19 and just gave

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