A Guy in the Pew

Bob Herbert of the New York Times has a must-read column this week on the often forgotten issue of modern slavery--in the United States. As I have said before, this is a moral issue that should be at the forefront of any values agenda. Sadly, it is not: The woman testifying in federal court in Lower Manhattan could hardly have seemed more insignificant. She was an immigrant from South Korea and a prostitute, who spoke little or no English. She worked, she said, in brothels in New York, Philadelphia, Georgia, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. She did not offer a portrait of the good life. Speaking through an interpreter, she told about the time in D.C. when a guy came in who looked “like a mental patient, a psycho.” Weirded out, she wanted nothing to do with him. But she said the woman who ran the brothel assured her everything would be fine. It was fine if you consider wrestling with Hannibal Lecter fine. The john clawed at this woman, gouging her flesh, peeling the ski...

In an effort that can only be called Orwellian, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is limited the religious books available to federal prisoners to a set of 150 government approved titles for each faith. All other books are banned. As a result, by the way, the works of theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Cardinal Avery Dulles and the works of most of the early church fathers are banned in federal prisons. The stated reason for this strange decision is that there is concern that some very problematic Islamic books were being read in prisons. Fair enough, but why not simply ban those books that could cause harm in the prisons rather than create a short, and incomplete list? The New York Times has the story: Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries. The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any ...

There are some issues that have great moral clarity--black and white, good and evil--and yet get ignored by nearly everyone. Worldwide child prostitution is such an issue. It is wrong--no ifs or qualifications, and yet every year tourists from the United States travel abroad for the very purpose of having sex with a child. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has done a great job of trying to focus attention on this issue. today, Michael Gerson has a great column about how progress is finally being made in combating this sex tourism: One sexual predator, when interviewed by the FBI , described his experience with foreign child prostitutes this way: "It's like being a star. They want to try my food. They want to see what clothes I wear. They want to watch my television." Such "stars" are the global consumers of innocence, exercising a particularly brutal form of power over the poorest, most vulnerable children on Earth. About 25 percent of sex tourists targeti...

A few weeks ago there was much excitement in the media about the discovery of wter under the Darfur region of Sudan. Many commentators opined that this would cause a decline in the Darfur genocide since the genocide was Caused" by climate change in the region. As Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic notes, the notion that climate change "caused" the Darfur genocide is fraught with moral danger and philisophical error: If I were a Janjaweed, and could read as well as rape, I would be quite heartened by reports of the latest brilliant idea about the suffering in Darfur. The idea to which I refer is that the cause of the atrocity is climate change. This grandiose hypothesis has been popularized by Ban Ki-moon, who wrote last month that "[t]here is a very strong link between land degradation, desertification, and conflict in Darfur. Northern Darfur--where exponential population growth and related environmental stress have created the conditions for conflict to be trig...

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has announced an innovative way of letting the Sudanese Government know that the world is indeed watching the action in Darfur. Here is the S cience Daily report : A pioneering AAAS program that provides technical expertise to human rights groups is helping Amnesty International USA with a new online effort to monitor threatened settlements in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan and provide evidence of destroyed villages. High-resolution commercial satellite images, analyzed by AAAS researchers, will be posted after 12:01 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time Wednesday, 6 June to Amnesty International's new "Eyes on Darfur" Web site (http://www.eyesondarfur.org). The project is the first effort by a human rights group to use satellite cameras to help protect vulnerable populations. It will allow computer users around the globe to visually track the status of settlements Amnesty International considers possible targets of attack. ...