Human Rights Trafficking Quotes

I know what kind of man it takes to get involved with something as barbarous as human trafficking.” “I get it, Swopes. He’s not the kind of man you take home to meet your stepmom.” I rethought that. “Wait a minute. Maybe my stepmom would like to meet him. Do you think he ships to Istanbul?

Emotional detachment from the plight of others — easily achieved by simply looking the other way — always favoured the perpetrators rather than the victims who were reduced to being inconsequential nonentities; were persecuted and denied legal and human rights; were starving, sick, and dying; were victims of Apartheid policies with racial segregations inclusive of political and economic discrimination; were harassed, internally displaced, or forcibly deported; were imprisoned, tortured, or simply “disappeared”; were enslaved, exploited, or trafficked; and were ultimately the victims of mindless massacres that defied the comprehension of anyone even remotely humane.

There is a reason fairy tales most commonly end with happy endings. It is because nobody wants to face the realization of human depravity.

Human trafficking is not only an injustice to the victim, but it is an injustice unto the families and friends of that victim.

People who are trafficked are often the most vulnerable in our society.

Culture is no excuse for abuse

It’s funny, because we all read history and we think, ‘Oh, I would … have risen up, I would have fought, I would have been an abolitionist,' And I tell them, ‘No, you wouldn’t have. If you would have, you’d be doing that right now. You know trafficking exists, you’ve heard of it, but you don’t want to look.

Human trafficking can and does occur in every corner of the world.

Human trafficking is a multi-billion dollar industry that is not only fueled by main street, but it also ruled by Wall Street...

Human trafficking is the intentional forcing of another into slavery.

The good news is that a victim of human trafficking does not have to remain a victim.

Unfortunately, what anti-human trafficking NGOs [non-governmental organizations] really do is instead quite damaging: they normalize existent labor opportunities for women, no matter how low the pay, dangerous the conditions, or abusive an environment they foster. And they shame women who reject such jobs.

There is one absolute commonality amongst the victims of human trafficking; the loss of personal freedom.

Bad is that often wildlife trafficking is described as a “victimless” crime. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the trafficked items come from murdered animals; Rhinoceros Horn, Ivory and Tiger skins; and hundreds of thousands of birds and animals die in transit in the most horrible circumstances imaginable. Just because they cannot communicate with us does not mean they are not victims. They feel, fear and die, just like humans.

Recent research has shown that traffickers are no longer just kidnapping individuals off of the street, but they are now employing new tactics to find their potential victims.

The Power of Awareness is working! It is proven by increased sentencing and understanding of the Sex Trafficking Problem by Judges, Prosecutors, and Jurors.

We sometimes hear people voice doubts about opposition to sex trafficking, genital cutting, or honor killings because of their supposed inevitability. What can our good intentions achieve against thousands of years of tradition? Our response is China. A century ago, China was arguably the worst place in the world to be born female. Foot-binding, child marriage, concubinage, and female infanticide were embedded in traditional Chinese culture...So was it cultural imperialism for Westerners to criticize foot-binding and female infanticide? Perhaps. But it was also the right thing to do. If we believe firmly in certain values, such as the equality of all human beings regardless of color or gender, then we should not be afraid to stand up for them; it would be feckless to defer to slavery, torture, foot-binding, honor killings, or genital cutting just because we believe in respecting other faiths or cultures. One lesson of China is that we need not accept that discrimination is an intractable element of any society. If culture were immutable, China would still be impoverished and [women] would be stumbling around on three-inch feet.

What freedom are we to find when our restless minds are enslaved under the chains of human trafficking? What freedom do we preach when our females breathe through enraged wounds? They are used and abused, left in caves alienated and bruised. What is this language we speak of when we talk about the law, since the human right clause is ignored and flawed? Whom is it protecting because here we are protesting? Isn't this law ought to save the bodies of young females? Isn't this law ought to be brave and remove females from sex frames? Instead, it chooses for women and children to die leaving their loved ones with no goodbyes. Human trafficking, I say, has made enough money for the day.

The just censure of society is accorded to those so inconstant and intemperate that they must take their pleasures in the unholy market of humanity that still sullies the fame of our civilization; but for the traders themselves, these human vampires who prey upon the degradation of their species, society has reserved the right of ruthless suppression.

What haunts me is that the prevalence of human trafficking, particularly the sex trafficking of underage girls and young women, means that I have almost definitely seen one of these individuals in my daily life. I’ve sat next to them on the bus, or ordered coffee right behind them. Were their eyes begging for my help, and I simply overlooked, did not notice? Shenita Etwaroo

American diplomats had been slow to understand the scope of the change being driven by Chinese migration to Africa. The phenomenon had been flagged in State Department cables as early as 2005, with diplomats identifying the budding, large-scale movement of people from China to Africa as part of a campaign to expand Beijing’s political influence and simultaneously advance China’s business interests and overall clout. These early, classified warnings also spoke of the spread, via emigration, of Chinese organized crime, particularly in smuggling and human trafficking. For the most part, however, it seemed that American diplomats were still in search of the right voice, the right message. All too often, Washington struck a paternalistic tone that came across as: Listen up children, you must be careful about these tricky Chinese.

During our recent Human Rights Defenders Forum at The Carter Center, it was reported that between two hundred and three hundred children are sold in Atlanta alone each month! Our city is considered to be one of the preeminent human trafficking centers in the United States, perhaps because we have the busiest airport in the world and because, until recently, the penalty for someone convicted of selling another human being was only a $50 fine. A much heavier penalty of up to twenty years’ imprisonment can be imposed by the federal government, but only if there is proof that the trafficking took place across state lines. An analysis by Atlanta social workers found that 42 percent of the sexual exchanges they investigated were in brothels and hotel rooms in the most affluent areas of the city, while only 9 percent were in the poorer neighborhoods in the vicinity of the airport. Like Kara, they too conclude that the primary culprits are the men who buy sexual favors and the male pimps and brothel owners who control the women and garner most of the financial gains.

Saturday evening, on a quiet lazy afternoon, I went to watch a bullfight in Las Ventas, one of Madrid's most famous bullrings. I went there out of curiosity. I had long been haunted by the image of the matador with its custom made torero suit, embroidered with golden threads, looking spectacular in his "suit of light" or traje de luces as they call it in Spain. I was curious to see the dance of death unfold in front of me, to test my humanity in the midst of blood and gold, and to see in which state my soul will come out of the arena, whether it will be shaken and stirred, furious and angry, or a little bit aware of the life embedded in every death. Being an avid fan of Hemingway, and a proponent of his famous sentence "About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after,” I went there willingly to test myself. I had heard atrocities about bullfighting yet I had this immense desire to be part of what I partially had an inclination to call a bloody piece of cultural experience. As I sat there, in front of the empty arena, I felt a grandiose feeling of belonging to something bigger than anything I experienced during my stay in Spain. Few minutes and I'll be witnessing a painting being carefully drawn in front of me, few minutes and I will be part of an art form deeply entrenched in the Spanish cultural heritage: the art of defying death. But to sit there, and to watch the bull enter the arena… To watch one bull surrounded by a matador and his six assistants. To watch the matador confronting the bull with the capote, performing a series of passes, just before the picador on a horse stabs the bull's neck, weakening the neck muscles and leading to the animal's first loss of blood... Starting a game with only one side having decided fully to engage in while making sure all the odds will be in the favor of him being a predetermined winner. It was this moment precisely that made me feel part of something immoral. The unfair rules of the game. The indifferent bull being begged to react, being pushed to the edge of fury. The bull, tired and peaceful. The bull, being teased relentlessly. The bull being pushed to a game he isn't interested in. And the matador getting credits for an unfair game he set. As I left the arena, people looked at me with mocking eyes. Yes, I went to watch a bull fight and yes the play of colors is marvelous. The matador’s costume is breathtaking and to be sitting in an arena fills your lungs with the sands of time. But to see the amount of claps the spill of blood is getting was beyond what I can endure. To hear the amount of claps injustice brings is astonishing. You understand a lot about human nature, about the wars taking place every day, about poverty and starvation. You understand a lot about racial discrimination and abuse (verbal and physical), sex trafficking, and everything that stirs the wounds of this world wide open. You understand a lot about humans’ thirst for injustice and violence as a way to empower hidden insecurities. Replace the bull and replace the matador. And the arena will still be there. And you'll hear the claps. You've been hearing them ever since you opened your eyes.

The serious crimes committed in the process of trafficking include assault and battery, rape, torture, abduction, sale of human beings, unlawful detention, murder, deprivation of labor rights, and fraud. Yet trafficking is a crime that normally goes unpunished. In the US, for example, around 17,000 people are trafficked into the country and enslaved each year. The country also has 17,000 murders annually. But the national success rate in the US for solving murder cases is about seventy percent. Compare that to the rate for human trafficking. According to the US government’s own numbers, the annual percentage of trafficking and slavery cases solved is less than one percent.

So how did it come to this? Why did the Australian government have to provide a protection visa for José on the grounds that a religious organisation it deems a tax-exempt charity had trafficked him? How could a church that claims to believe in freedom and human rights enslave and traffic its members? How could a church that in its own religious creed says ‘that all men have inalienable rights to their own lives’ separate a loving couple who wanted to get married and have a child, and force the woman to have an abortion? How could a church use Australia as a penal colony in the 21st century? To understand the madness of modern-day Scientology, you need to go back to the source, and the thinking that marked its very beginning.

Some of my friends in concerned and committed activist organizations think that psychological analysis is actually the enemy of finding solutions. They think anyone with deep interest in psychology must be a total “navel gazer,” trying more to get away from the world's problems than to solve them. Some of these people believe that the world's problems would disappear if they could just translate all religious categories into Marxist terms and get everyone to be socialists. They assume, for example, that Marxists would never engage in cocaine trafficking, that a Marxist country would never have to shoot its generals for smuggling in cocaine, and that Marxists would never execute people who were longing for freedom. Did you know that? We would not have to execute students, or shoot them in the streets, if we were Marxists. You can go on and on with that, and it makes me sick, because it shows such an incredible naiveté about the realities of life. They need to read Reinhold Niebuhr's classic works on the dynamics of human pride that afflict all ideologies left and right (Niebuhr 1941–1943). The human predicament does not result from having the wrong ideology.

Why? Why do the authorities allow the criminal gangs that terrorize neighborhoods and entire cities to thrive as they do? Politicians, attorneys general, district attorneys, and the FBI have the power to destroy the gangs and prevent most of the crimes they commit, the murdering and raping and human trafficking and the endless flood of drugs across the border, the hateful murdering murdering murdering of faithful husbands and little girls in their Sunday dresses. Yet the people with the power to stop men like Hamal and Lupo and Parker often facilitate their activities. Maybe the majority of politicians and their appointees are corrupt, but not all. Are those uncorrupted individuals so often ineffective because they are cowards or lazy or stupid? Does loyalty to party, class, club, or ideology matter to them more than doing what is right? Why? Why can’t such people see that the crime and anarchy they permit to flourish in poor and middle-class neighborhoods will eventually metastasize into the enclaves of the elite where they live their privileged lives? Why do they have contempt for those not in their circle? Why can’t they see that being of the people rather than ruling over them is the only way that they themselves will survive?

You sound off,” he said. “Why are you whispering? I thought you and Ana were having dinner together.” I bit my lip. “It’s kind of a funny story, but you have to promise not to yell.” “Why would a funny story make me yell?” he asked warily. “Well,” I drawled. “I was on my way to meet up with Ana, and there was this truck parked in an alley that didn’t look right. So, I left my bike on the street and went to check it out.” “Jordan.” I didn’t need to see him to know he was pinching the bridge of his nose, something he’d been doing a lot in the last few months. “Don’t worry. They didn’t see me.” His tone sharpened. “Who didn’t see you?” “The Gulaks. They were too busy loading the girls into the back.” I paused as the truck slowed going around a curve. “I slipped on without them having a clue I was there.” He swore. “Do not tell me you climbed into a truck with a bunch of Gulak slavers.” I scoffed softly. “Of course not. Give me some credit. I’m on the roof of the truck.” He growled something, and I heard another male laughing. It sounded like Mario, one of the warriors we were working with on this job, along with his mate, Ana. We’d been in Panama for two weeks, at the request of the government, to locate and shut down a human trafficking ring. But this one was a lot more sophisticated than any other Gulak operation we’d encountered, and they’d managed to evade us completely. Until now. “This is not a funny story,” he said in an exasperated voice.

Ah, my dear friend Hassim, seems our paths cross once again, how fortunate for this humble Sheik.” As Abdullah spoke in his usual self deprecating manner I realized that a favor was on the tip of his tongue and that I was about to be offered a quid-pro-quo. We were sitting crossed legged on large fat pillows with gold fringe. The tent was large with partitions dividing living, sleeping and cooking space. It was made from heavy cotton canvas erected on thick poles in the center giving the structure a peaked circus tent appearance. The women serving us were young, wearing harem pants low on their hips with cropped gauze tops made from sheer silk. Their exposed midriffs were flat and toned, their belly buttons were decorated in precious stones that glittered in the torch light as they moved. They were bare footed with stacks of gold ankle bracelets making the only sound we heard as they kept our glasses filled with fresh sweet tea and our communal serving trays piled high with dates and sugar incrusted sweets of undetermined origin. Abdullah took no notice of these women, his nonchalance intrigued me as I was obviously having trouble keeping my mind focused on the discussion at hand, this was all part of the Arab way, when it came to negotiation they had no peers. “So my dear friend, tell me, the region is on fire is there a solution?” I spoke in a deliberate and flat tone, little emotion just concern, one friend to another. “We were shocked by the American response in Egypt and Libya, never had we seen them move so fast with such efficiency. The fall of Gadaffi was unexpected and Mubarak’s fate stunned us; he had been a staunch supporter of the US in this region we fully expected the Obama administration to prop him up one more time, as they had done so many times in the past.” I looked carefully at Abdullah,

Dehumanization has fueled innumerable acts of violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocides. It makes slavery, torture, and human trafficking possible. Dehumanizing others is the process by which we become accepting of violations against human nature, the human spirit, and, for many of us, violations against the central tenets of our faith. How does this happen? Maiese explains that most of us believe that people’s basic human rights should not be violated—that crimes like murder, rape, and torture are wrong. Successful dehumanizing, however, creates moral exclusion. Groups targeted based on their identity—gender, ideology, skin color, ethnicity, religion, age—are depicted as “less than” or criminal or even evil. The targeted group eventually falls out of the scope of who is naturally protected by our moral code. This is moral exclusion, and dehumanization is at its core. Dehumanizing always starts with language, often followed by images. We see this throughout history. During the Holocaust, Nazis described Jews as Untermenschen—subhuman. They called Jews rats and depicted them as disease-carrying rodents in everything from military pamphlets to children’s books. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Indigenous people are often referred to as savages. Serbs called Bosnians aliens. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. I know it’s hard to believe that we ourselves could ever get to a place where we would exclude people from equal moral treatment, from our basic moral values, but we’re fighting biology here. We’re hardwired to believe what we see and to attach meaning to the words we hear. We can’t pretend that every citizen who participated in or was a bystander to human atrocities was a violent psychopath. That’s not possible, it’s not true, and it misses the point. The point is that we are all vulnerable to the slow and insidious practice of dehumanizing, therefore we are all responsible for recognizing it and stopping it. THE COURAGE TO EMBRACE OUR HUMANITY Because so many time-worn systems of power have placed certain people outside the realm of what we see as human, much of our work now is more a matter of “rehumanizing.” That starts in the same place dehumanizing starts—with words and images. Today we are edging closer and closer to a world where political and ideological discourse has become

Simultaneously, in a culture that takes pride in women’s rights and professional achievements, females are commonly portrayed as sexual commodities. —Demand Report, Shared Hope International1

The huge increase in illegal immigration caused by the rescission of prior immigration practices, policies, and laws by the Biden Administration, and the violation of human rights that has accompanied many of these immigrants—including coercion, violence, rape, debts, and payments[—]would qualify as human trafficking,’ Hauser said. ‘That is slavery.’ ”33

his view of the Princeton population took on a dark edge. “The values of the secular elite university are so radically anti-Christian,” he warned. “They are the harbingers of the culture of death. They create the culture of death. This is where the seeds are planted. You can see what is coming down the line by just looking at the atmosphere there now: hedonistic, naturalistic, secularistic.

call to arms against the Freemasons, the Jews, and the Communists.

Recruits were also to be encouraged to distance themselves from their families.

he was visited by two Opus Dei priests who told him that her death was God’s punishment for leaving the Work.

Escrivá had told Luis Valls-Taberner to always avoid any connections to Opus Dei, even when specifically carrying out deeds in its name. “Don’t use ‘we,’ conjugate using only ‘I,’ ” he had said.

His relations with the papacy had also begun to sour. Escrivá had never warmed to Pope John XXIII, who had been elected after the death of Pius XII in 1958 and quickly became known as the “good pope” for his efforts to liberalize the Church.

vanished from public view. Charles John McCloskey III was a fifty-year-old priest who had grown up in Falls Church, Virginia, a small town on the outskirts of D.C. Fresh-faced, with piercing blue eyes, thick black eyebrows, and prematurely silver hair combed neatly to the side,

McCloskey was personally responsible for the conversion of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, several congressmen, and high-profile political pundits such as Robert Novak and Larry Kudlow.

Opus Dei was deeply political at its core; it was a reactionary stand against the progressive forces that were transforming society.

Pull up her skirt, pull down her pants, and smack her on the ass until she talks. Make her talk!” He then turned to Tapia.

He brought in Marts & Lundy, the leading consultancy firm in the philanthropy industry, which advised Opus Dei to compile a list of potential wealthy donors—basically anyone who might be able to contribute at least $10,000, which was equivalent to about half of what the average American earned annually—and write to each one with a clear, one-page pitch.

Opus Dei also routinely violated canon law regarding minors. The Church specifically prohibited the recruitment of anyone younger than eighteen. Publicly, the movement acknowledged this in its official statutes that had been presented to the Vatican. But in its secret guidelines for members, Del Portillo effectively encouraged numeraries to target children as young as fourteen

Spiritual—and sexual—abuse of minors festered in such an environment.

Catherine Tissier had been fourteen when her parents signed her up for the three-year hospitality course at the École Hôtelière Dosnon. She would later become the first public whistleblower of the systematic abuse of numerary assistants.

With bills needing to be paid, the numeraries that ran the residence were encouraged by their superiors to falsify the college’s accounts to give the impression that everything was in order—both to their superiors back in Rome and also to the local banks, which continued to offer the college and other Opus Dei initiatives access to credit based on the college’s sound profits.

Over the coming months, a feeding frenzy ensued, with pieces in the Chicago Tribune and Newsday, and on National Public Radio giving voice to former members willing to talk about its abusive practices. CNN aired a segment on Opus Dei as part of a series it was doing on secret societies, with host Anderson Cooper hearing from a former numerary assistant who talked about the “cult-like” practices of life within the prelature. To make matters worse, Sony Pictures acquired the rights to turn the book into a film. Bohlin wrote an angry letter, demanding a meeting with the studio’s head of motion pictures and requesting that the name of Opus Dei not be used. The request fell on deaf ears.

In May, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was the main speaker at a fundraiser event for the new numerary residence that Opus Dei was building in Reston, Virginia.

Franco invited Escrivá to give a private, six-day retreat for himself and his wife at the El Pardo palace, where they lived.

introduced a requirement to kneel in his presence.

The papal decree would give Opus Dei carte blanche to ignore canon law for the next forty years.

To Del Portillo’s horror, the bishops had refused to back down in their assertion that personal prelatures—in accordance with the original thinking behind their creation at the Second Vatican Council—were to be made up only of priests.

country—as a tax-efficient way of running its finances, and as a way of protecting the movement from any potential legal problems. During deliberations with the judge, Opus Dei successfully argued that it had only been responsible for the spiritual formation of the young numerary assistant—and not for any breaches of labor law or alleged enslavement. It was the first of many times over the next three decades that such a tactic would prove successful.

With bills needing to be paid, the numeraries that ran the residence were encouraged by their superiors to falsify the college’s accounts to give the impression that everything was in order—both to their superiors back in Rome and also to the local banks, which continued to offer the college and other Opus Dei initiatives access to credit based on the college’s sound profits. When one numerary shared with his spiritual director how the pressure to cook the books was preventing him from sleeping, he was encouraged to take sedatives prescribed by an Opus Dei doctor.

How could a well-known Spanish lender, an institution with a proud ninety-year history, which owned another bank in the United States and had offices as far afield as Shanghai, Dubai, and Rio de Janeiro, just disappear overnight?

Tapia knew about the microphones the founder had installed in many parts of the complex, which were connected to his private quarters and which allowed him to listen in on members’ private conversations.

At the most poignant moment in the ceremony—with the lights turned down and the congregation knelt in silent prayer—a shout rose out from the back of the nave: “Franco, you traitor!” A commotion broke out and a uniformed member of the Falange youth wing was frogmarched out of the basilica and taken away for questioning. After a grueling interrogation, the police made a startling discovery: the lone agitator said his entire regiment had planned on shouting in unison but had lost their nerve at the last minute. The source of their ire: Opus Dei and its growing power.

Having just been named the number one business school in the world by The Economist, the institution’s plans were already underway to assemble a large research team in the city, which would be tasked with advising the country’s largest companies on important topics such as globalization, innovation, regulation, and corporate governance.

For years, the residence in Buenos Aires, where it now entertained the There Be Dragons cast and crew, had allegedly been home to one of Opus Dei’s largest and most ruthless slave labor operations. This prime piece of real estate had effectively been gifted to the organization by the military junta in 1972, in a sign of its cozy relationship with a regime that, at the time, was “disappearing” tens of thousands of people across the country—first torturing them in illegal detention centers and then throwing them, drugged and beaten, out of military planes over the Atlantic Ocean.

For me, it’s an honor that Americans are attacking me,” Francis later told reporters aboard the papal aircraft, when asked about the “Red Hat Report” and the involvement of Tim Busch.

If Francis dies before real reform happens—and if his successor proves unwilling or unable to carry on his initiative—then Opus Dei will emerge from its near-death experience invigorated and defiant. Revitalized, backed by its army of donors, the movement will plow forward with its plans to re-Christianize the planet, whether that’s what people want or not. Gay marriage, secular education, scientific research, and the arts will fast become its next targets. Given its supporters’ unexpected victory over abortion, it’s quite possible that Opus Dei and its sympathizers could mastermind equally devastating victories in those areas.

Banco Popular helped to finance a global network of so-called vocational schools that targeted young women, many of them still children, from poor backgrounds and coerced them into a life of servitude for Opus Dei. Many were trafficked around the world to meet the needs of the movement. Robert Wilkinson / Alamy

It was an arduous, backbreaking existence—one that had been meticulously designed by the Opus Dei founder.

In 2011, Leo teamed up with Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni to co-found another nonprofit that successfully opposed an Islamic center being built near the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York, denigrated as the “Ground Zero Mosque.

The refusal of Opus Dei to talk to Del Valle relit his longstanding hatred toward the religious order. As a young man he had been a member in Mexico but left under mysterious circumstances. Years later, he had joined the Legionaries of Christ, a movement set up in the late 1950s by Marcial Maciel, a Mexican priest who was later revealed to have been a long-time drug addict who had sexually abused the boys and young men in his care.

One Popular board member even learned that Del Valle had been overheard talking about his investment in the bank as part of a much larger plan to join the forces of Opus Dei and Legionaries of Christ, in a move that would restore the tarnished religious movement to prominence.

The financial troubles were bad enough, but Saracho soon discovered he had another, even more unexpected problem to deal with. The board—the people he needed to support his efforts to turn around the bank—seemed oddly divided into two rival Catholic sects. After almost forty years of dealing with companies of all sizes, from every corner of the world, he had never before seen anything like it. He had walked into of the middle of a religious turf war—Opus Dei versus the Legionaries of Christ.

Benedict had resigned against a backdrop of scandal and outrage, following leaks of documents exposing widespread corruption and misuse of Church funds right across the Holy See, in what became known as the Vati-Leaks scandal. Francis was keen to put a distinctive stamp on his papacy and return the Church to what he considered the true mission of Jesus Christ, after more than thirty years of domination by conservative forces under John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

She confessed this to Father Danilo, who offered to return it on her behalf—a rare demonstration of compassion within the center. Opus Dei would eventually take away all the responsibilities that Father Danilo had toward its members. His body was later found on the train tracks a short distance away, with a note asking the police to inform the residence of his suicide.

All of these third ways end up the same way: a behavior the Bible does not accept is treated as acceptable. “Agree to disagree” sounds like a humble “meet you in the middle” compromise, but it is a subtle way of telling conservative Christians that homosexuality is not a make-or-break issue and we are wrong to make it so. No one would think of proposing a third way if the sin were racism or human trafficking. To countenance such a move would be a sign of moral bankruptcy. Faithfulness to the Word of God compels us to view sexual immorality with the same seriousness. Living an ungodly life is contrary to the sound teaching that defines the Christian (1 Tim. 1:8–11; Titus 1:16). Darkness must not be confused with light. Grace must not be confused with license. Unchecked sin must not be confused with the good news of justification apart from works of the law. Far from treating sexual deviance as a lesser ethical issue, the New Testament sees it as a matter for excommunication (1 Corinthians 5), separation (2 Cor. 6:12–20), and a temptation for perverse compromise (Jude 3–16). We cannot count same-sex behavior as an indifferent matter. Of course, homosexuality isn’t the only sin in the world, nor is it the most critical one to address in many church contexts. But if 1 Corinthians 6 is right, it’s not an overstatement to say that solemnizing same-sex sexual behavior—like supporting any form of sexual immorality—runs the risk of leading people to hell. Scripture often warns us—and in the severest terms—against finding our sexual identity apart from Christ and against pursuing sexual practice inconsistent with being in Christ (whether that’s homosexual sin, or, much more frequently, heterosexual sin). The same is not true when it comes to sorting out the millennium or deciding which instruments to use in worship. When we tolerate the doctrine which affirms homosexual behavior, we are tolerating a doctrine which leads people further from God. This is not the mission Jesus gave his disciples when he told them to teach the nations everything he commanded. The biblical teaching is consistent and unambiguous: homosexual activity is not God’s will for his people. Silence in the face of such clarity is not prudence, and hesitation in light of such frequency is not patience. The Bible says more than enough about homosexual practice for us to say something too.

country. These children are not seen as credible. No one believes them, and all the funding goes to other countries. Our hope is that children in our country will have the same value as people in other countries. It is much easier to send your money to a third world country instead of getting your hands dirty right here.   Again, we have this whole segment of children in our country that we call throwaways. We want to eradicate that term, and we want to make every child in our country have value and human dignity.     Traffick911

As I learned more about choice, and looked over the extensive evidence in all of the cases I had testified in, I realized that what was happening in the FLDS was human trafficking-both for labor and for sex. In mainstream society, money and lust are the currency. In the FLDS, salvation and position are the currency, but the forced acts of labor and sex are the same-the very definition of slavery. And whether greed or God is the currency, it is not right to own another's free agency.

A cult of personality was being built around him, cultivated and encouraged by the man himself.

By the mid-’60s, some 138 “support companies” had been set up to generate funds to finance Escrivá’s ambitions

One respected Swiss theologian, who would later become an advisor to two popes, dismissed The Way, the founder’s seminal work, as nothing more than a “handbook for senior scouts” and openly criticized Opus Dei for “purchasing” spirituality through its various business interests. “Purchased spirit is a contradiction in itself,” he surmised.

Also in attendance was Mother Teresa, whose own popularity was the envy of the conservative wing that now so dominated the Vatican. “Why does the press speak so favorably of Mother Teresa but it doesn’t do the same when it speaks about Opus Dei or about me?” the pope had remarked in a private audience with Del Portillo.

Calvi’s death, his son went public with startling revelations in the Wall Street Journal about how Calvi had been negotiating with Opus Dei to bail out the Vatican just before his death.

On the morning of June 17, 1982, the body of an Italian banker was found hanging from scaffolding under Blackfriars Bridge in London, his pockets stuffed with thousands of dollars in foreign banknotes, and he was weighed down with bricks from a nearby building site. Roberto Calvi had, until the day before, been the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, an institution with a rich history founded in 1896 by a priest in Milan with a vision for providing credit to the local community in a way that was in keeping with Catholic teachings. It was also a bank mired in scandal, after the discovery that Calvi had authorized hundreds of millions of dollars to be secreted out of the company to a network of shell companies registered in Panama and Liechtenstein.

Both Israel and the US trained and armed death squads in Colombia well into the 2000s. The former drug trafficker Carlos Castaño, who ran a far-right paramilitary force, explains in his ghost-written autobiography, “I learned an infinite amount of things in Israel [in the 1980s], and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievements. I copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis.”23 He reportedly arrived in Israel in 2004 after fleeing his own country.

A Trafficker is the most reliable person you will ever meet!

The evidence piles up. And in the face of this evidence, proponents of green growth eventually begin to turn to fairy tales. Sure, they say, maybe green growth isn’t empirically actual, but there’s no reason that it can’t happen in theory. We are limited only by our imagination! There’s no reason we can’t have our incomes rising for ever while we nonetheless consume less material stuff each year. And here they are right. There’s no a priori reason why such a thing can’t happen in theory, in a magical alternative world. But there’s a certain moral hazard at stake when we start trafficking in fairy tales – telling people not to worry because eventually, somehow, GDP will de-link from resource use and we’ll be in the clear. In an era of climate emergency and mass extinction, we don’t have time to speculate about imaginary possibilities. We don’t have time to wait for this juggernaut of ecological destruction to suddenly stop being destructive, when all the evidence says it won’t happen. It is unscientific, and a profoundly irresponsible gamble with human lives – with all of life. There is an easy way to solve this problem. For decades, ecological economists have proposed that we can put an end to the debate once and for all with a simple and elegant intervention: impose a cap on annual resource use and waste, and tighten that cap year-on-year until we are back within planetary boundaries.36 If green growthers really believe GDP will keep growing, for ever, despite rapid reductions in material use, then this shouldn’t worry them one bit. In fact, they should welcome such a move. It will give them a chance to prove to the world once and for all that they are right. Indeed, putting hard limits on resource use and waste will help incentivise the transition, spurring the shift toward dematerialised GDP growth. But every time we propose this policy to green growthers, they wriggle away. Indeed, to my knowledge, not a single proponent of green growth has ever agreed to take it up. Why not? I suspect that on some deep level – despite the fairy tales – they realise that this is not how capitalism actually works. For 500 years, capitalism has depended on extraction from nature. It has always needed an ‘outside’, external to itself, from which to plunder value, for free, without an equivalent return. That’s what fuels growth. To put a limit on material extraction and waste is to effectively kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

I am sick and tired of hearing, the universe knows best. If the universe knew best, no child would cry of hunger. If the universe knew best, no young girl would fall victim to human trafficking. If the universe knew best, nobody would have to struggle till death to feed their family. If the universe knew best, not a single person would ever become a refugee. If the universe knew best, not a single human being would have to suffer on the face of earth. Any universe or god that allows for such horrors to teach humanity lessons or whatever, got to be extremely sick. Insects from the sewers deserve more respect than such sick forces. The reason these horrors take place is that, contrary to all cowardly beliefs, there is no higher force concerned with human welfare. If we want these horrors to end, we gotta take the initiative to end them ourselves, without relying on prehistoric fairytales. So, stop all that supernatural nonsense, and take some responsibility for the world you live in. Stop delegating your human duties to a fictitious force and stand civilized wielding your backbone for a change.

The enslavement of human beings amounts to a grave violation of human rights. The institution of slavery is a sin, a form of genocide, and a system of racial oppression, exploitation, and intergenerational theft that robs people of their freedom of movement, expression, and self-determination. It endeavors to deny people their dignity and humanity, among other things. From the vantage point of the monarch, the oligarch, the slave trader, or the banker, however, human trafficking is first and foremost a for-profit endeavor, a business enterprise designed to enrich its partners and shareholders. Moreover, the profit motive justifies the abuses, and the attendant systems of racial oppression and white supremacy that certainly must follow.

If the solution to all of Africa’s illegal practices and crimes is to legalize them, then we are a doomed continent. Human trafficking; buying, selling, and consuming illegal addictive drugs; fraudulent financial transactions, computer hacking, identity theft—would legalizing these destructive behaviors improve society? If not, why would legalizing abortion improve the lives of Africans?

South of Larissa the landscape began to change. Jude watched an irrigation machine like a giant stick insect creeping over a field, and a tractor racing across another, raking up a dust cloud behind in a brown jet stream.