Session Notes

Guardian.co.uk  

Last week, on an internet radio channel called The Fifth Column, I debated climate change with Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, one of the rightwing libertarian groups that rose from the ashes of the Revolutionary Communist party. Fox is a feared interrogator on the BBC show The Moral Maze. Yet when I asked her a simple question – “do you accept that some people’s freedoms intrude upon other people’s freedoms?” – I saw an ideology shatter like a windscreen. I used the example of a Romanian lead-smelting plant I had visited in 2000, whose freedom to pollute is shortening the lives of its neighbours. Surely the plant should be regulated in order to enhance the negative freedoms – freedom from pollution, freedom from poisoning – of its neighbours? She tried several times to answer it, but nothing coherent emerged which would not send her crashing through the mirror of her philosophy.

He’s right – but he’s missing a key point: The libertarian movement has rightly seized on one of the fundamental tenants of the doctrine of freedom taught by Paul: For freedom to be freedom, freedom must be absolute.

But, they miss the foundational logic behind such. The entirety of Scripture is pretty clear on one key point: people with un-transformed hearts need the law. They need to be controlled and they need a system of punishment to back such or other people would be harmed.

The intention of other people not being harmed has never changed.

All that has changed is the mechanism of the delivery of such. It’s based on the foundational assumption that people’s hearts can be changed and that every other part of them can be made new – such that they want new things. It’s based on the belief that it is possible to have such a profound encounter with love in the form of the person of Christ that the human heart can come to feel the pain of others and care as deeply for the pain of another as if it were their own pain. It’s based on the assumption that a person can come to hear the voice of God and, indeed, can come to long to do so.

A person who is that deeply transformed can be set absolutely free for they no longer need the control of law to cease hurting and commence loving others.

Libertarian ideology ignores once simple reality: Not all hearts have been transformed.

They could be – but some don’t want to be, some are too damaged to understand how to be, some are too afraid to be and some are so deluded that they actually think the evil that defines their lives IS transformation.

Those people need the law that the adherents of this level of extremism want to and have largely succeeded in abolishing.

Ironic thing is, it’s predominantly Christians who are promoting the ideological delusion that setting people free with un-transformed hearts is consistent with the Gospel…

American Psychological Association

CPS involvement did not improve long-run outcomes, a 2010 study found. Such involvement sometimes harms children by taking them from their families unnecessarily – which, in my office’s experience, happens more than 100 times each year in the District. These removals traumatize children and devastate families.

I wish I could disagree with the study, but, while I have always followed the code drilled into me at least once every month of my training and constantly by every brief of the laws I am under, about 2/3rds of the time, I ended up wishing I had not. Most of the time, it’s like watching an episode of some sort of absurdist sitcom entitled, “The invasion of the mental munchkins.”

The same is true when adults report rapes etc. It’s been my experience that less then 2-3% of the offenders ever see a night in jail – while the victims get to experience a system that pretty much torments them for months and leaves them tormenting themselves long after. I’d say that the majority of the PTSD symptoms that later emerge are not the result of the rape but, rather, the result of police and social services stupidity.

As sad as it is to say, it’s getting so therapists need to issue guidelines for reporting to them…

Just a few of the things that are never taught in the ivory castles of education by those who epitomize the statement that, “Those who can, do, the rest teach,” to say nothing of even being remotely grasped by the legal system…

via HugoSchwyzer.net.

So many adults are fearful that telling kids that sex is pleasurable will simply encourage young people to have it before they are physically and emotionally ready for the consequences. Better, they imagine, to emphasize that it’s important to wait and to stress the risks. But as it turns out, centering pleasure is a great way to minimize the chances that a teen will be pressured into doing something that they don’t want to do.

When we tell girls that sex is something people do when they love each other, it sets them up to believe that sex is sacrificial. So when Jassie falls in love with Bobby, and Bobby pushes for intercourse, she’s conditioned to focus on “giving it up” for him rather than on thinking about what feels good for her. The more she’s taught that her pleasure matters, the less likely she’ll be coerced into going farther than her body is ready to go. “It’s supposed to feel good”, she may remember, “and right now, being rushed and pawed doesn’t feel good. So I want to stop.” Centering pleasure gives young women a power that centering love doesn’t.

The same is true with boys. When we teach them that sex is about feeling good, we remind them that it isn’t about “losing it.” We think of adolescent boys as hormone-addled horndogs, and many of them are. There are some pretty damn horny teenage girls too, though we’re less comfortable acknowledging that. But what drives so many boys to focus on having heterosexual intercourse isn’t the pursuit of pleasure for either themselves or their partners. It’s the longing to “become a man” or to “score” in a competition that’s really about winning praise and validation from other men. Pleasure becomes less important than being a “stud” in other boys’ eyes. That’s not a lot of fun.So Cooper got it exactly right. While there are other reasons why people have sex, the desire to give and share pleasure is perhaps the most basic. And the more we center pleasure in our discussions with children, the more we equip them to say no to what hurts, what’s coerced, and what’s unwanted. And the more we empower them to say “yes” only to what feels good.

All I can add to this is that, just perhaps, we can then focus the rest of our energy on teaching them what a balanced relationship looks like, what it means to defraud another and what it means to only awaken that which the time has come for it to be awakened. In other words, empower them to really keep the hearts of everyone safe.

via Danah Boyd.

For the last 12 years, I’ve dedicated immense amounts of time, money and energy to end violence against women and children. As a victim of violence myself, I’m deeply committed to destroying any institution or individual leveraging the sex-power matrix that results in child trafficking, nonconsensual prostitution, domestic violence and other abuses. If I believed that censoring Craigslist would achieve these goals, I’d be the first in line to watch them fall. But from the bottom of my soul and the depths of my intellect, I believe that the current efforts to censor Craigslist’s “adult services” achieves the absolute opposite. Rather than helping those who are abused, it fundamentally helps pimps, human traffickers and others who profit off of abusing others.

On Friday, under tremendous pressure from US attorneys general and public advocacy groups, Craigslist shut down its “Adult Services” section. There is little doubt that this space has been used by people engaged in all sorts of illicit activities, many of which result in harmful abuses. But the debate that has ensued has centered on the wrong axis, pitting protecting the abused against freedom of speech. What’s implied in public discourse is that protecting potential victims requires censorship; thus, anti-censorship advocates are up in arms attacking regulators for trying to curtail First Amendment rights. While I am certainly a proponent of free speech online, I find it utterly depressing that these groups fail to see how this is actually an issue of transparency, not free speech. And how this does more to hurt potential victims than help.

Law enforcement is always struggling to gain access to underground networks in order to go after the bastards who abuse people for profit. Underground enforcement is really difficult, and it takes a lot of time to invade a community and build enough trust to get access to information that will hopefully lead to the dens of sin. While it always looks so easy on TV, there’s nothing easy or pretty about this kind of work. The Internet has given law enforcement more data than they even know what to do with, more information about more people engaged in more horrific abuses than they’ve ever been able to obtain through underground work. It’s far too easy to mistake more data for more crime and too many aspiring governors use the increase of data to spin the public into a frenzy about the dangers of the Internet. The increased availability of data is not the problem; it’s a godsend for getting at the root of the problem and actually helping people.

Censoring Craigslist will do absolutely nothing to help those being victimized, but it will do a lot to help those profiting off of victimization. Censoring Craigslist will also create new jobs for pimps and other corrupt intermediaries, since it’ll temporarily make it a whole lot harder for individual scumbags to find clients. This will be particularly devastating for the low-end prostitutes who were using Craigslist to escape violent pimps. Keep in mind that occasionally getting beaten up by a scary john is often a whole lot more desirable for many than the regular physical, psychological, and economic abuse they receive from their pimps. So while it’ll make it temporarily harder for clients to get access to abusive services, nothing good will come out of it in the long run.

If you want to end human trafficking, if you want to combat nonconsensual prostitution, if you care about the victims of the sex-power industry, don’t cheer Craigslist’s censorship. This did nothing to combat the cycle of abuse. What we desperately need are more resources for law enforcement to leverage the visibility of the Internet to go after the scumbags who abuse. What we desperately need are for sites like Craigslist to be encouraged to work with law enforcement and help create channels to actually help victims. What we need are innovative citizens who leverage new opportunities to devise new ways of countering abusive industries. We need to take this moment of visibility and embrace it, leverage it to create change, leverage it to help those who are victimized and lack the infrastructure to get help. What you see online should haunt you. But it should drive you to address the core problem by finding and helping victims, not looking for new ways to blindfold yourself. Please, I beg you, don’t close your eyes. We need you.

Some articles are so brilliant and show such a grasp of the issues they nearly require no comment.

This whole Craigslist stupidity reminds me of the entire campaign to put children in school uniforms because it, “Ends gang violence.” At the end of the day, when others finally did the analysis, the same number of violent acts still went down in the schools — but now the teachers couldn’t identify the perpetrators as gang members (As they were no longer wearing their colors) so they just reported violent acts. Hence, the problem of gang violence in schools was fixed by uniforms.

The censoring of Craigslist by the Evangelical Right and the myopic blindness of the bleeding-heart Left will result in nothing more then the same illusion of safety though denial and sweeping the problem into someone else’s back-yard.

But, Shhh, nobody tell the Polaris Project or a blind crew of Attorney generals that the pimps have already moved over into the, “Casual Encounter’s,” section. You might spoil their celebration…

The Stranger, Seattle’s Only Newspaper

Some very scary s**t is going down in Texas. Scarier than usual. “Repent Amarillo” is a rabid group of religious nuts—homegrown religious extremists of the conservative Christian variety—and they’re not just going after the gays.

But, then again, Pat Robertson is actually starting to look rather normal, sane and on page with Jesus — at least when compared with, “Repent Amarillo,” where ministering the love of Jesus now includes stalking and terrorizing swingers in Amarillo, Texas (until the group disbanded) — and now is about erasing the Episcopalians…

Ya, getting them all fired is certain to bring the gentle, kind and love starved swinging community to the real love of Jesus and the healthy community of believers they so deeply need…

theglobeandmail.com

On Wednesday, an Ottawa official named Athanasios Hadjis quietly announced that section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, popularly known as the hate-speech law, will no longer be enforced.

The law prohibits the transmission on telephone or Internet of “any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt” on the basis of “race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, marital status, family status, disability and conviction for which a pardon has been granted.”

Mr. Hadjis is an adjudicator with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, which rules on discrimination cases. While he is not a judge, and therefore can’t strike down a law, he is the main gatekeeper for the hate-speech law, and his decision was bold.

“I have concluded,” he said, that the law is unconstitutional under 2(b) of the Charter of Rights, which guarantees freedom of thought, opinion and expression. As a result, he declared that “I will simply refuse to apply these provisions” to the hate-speech case he was judging, and by extension to any future cases.

Suddenly, the place known as the public sphere looks very different. For the past three decades, Canada has tried to keep it clean and neutral by preventing the appearance of the sorts of words and images that are linked to discriminatory actions. Kathleen Mahoney, a University of Calgary law professor who advocates such laws, boasts that Canada has more laws limiting harmful speech than any other country.

But there is a strong sense, even if Mr. Hadjis’s decision is overturned by the Supreme Court, that the era of hate-speech laws is coming to an end.

First, in practical terms, hate-speech laws have failed. Attacks on people based on religion or skin colour remain rare but occasional crimes in Canada, but their prevalence hasn’t been affected one way or another by outlawing hateful speech.

So very seldom does anyone connected to anything of government manage to get anything right, even the slightest touch of reason deserves to be applauded. But this, this is so far beyond just a touch of reason!!!

The psychology under it is actually very similar to claims of school uniforms eliminating gang violence in schools. If you actually look at the violence stats before and after the requirement of uniforms is in place at an institution, you find the exact same levels of violence — but no one can identify if a perpetrator of violence was a gang member or not. Thus the violent act is simply listed as violence and not attributed to a gang.

Laws intended to stop the speech of those who are inherently criminal will do almost nothing to arrest their behaviors (and it is almost always the behaviors that pose the threat.) All silencing them does is hide them from view. The problem is that, then, those same laws are used to also silence those with no criminal intent.

If there is ever a set of otherwise useless laws that have been used to suppress truth and cancel debate, it’s hate laws. They have been used to fine religious leaders speaking out against abortion. They have been used to destroy therapists who would treat politically correct disorders some do not want healed. They have been used to force religious institutions to hire those who do not support their views and they nearly canceled the degrees of hundreds of teachers who believed homosexuality should not be promoted. That’s not the elimination of hate — that’s reverse discrimination — politically correct hate against those who would stand in the public square and speak..

Personally, I WANT every wack job, hate monger, lunatic and predator to have the right to stand on the public street corner of the internet and shout their vile proclamations at the top of their digital lungs. It’s when your enemy goes silent that you know you are in trouble anyway and I WANT to know exactly where the problems are…

I want to watch them stand there toe-to-toe with every other idea and have to defend themselves from all the other people now free to speak and/or call them idiots…

I also WANT the ranks of the politically correct to have to stand up and defend the oh-so-sacred ideas they hold dear (Because I’m gonna to enjoy watching a lot of them start looking pretty silly..)

By some miracle, even the human rights commission agrees that we’re finally big enough boys and girls to be able to talk to each other — or at least have the right to go make some popcorn and watch the fireworks go down.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. ~Voltaire

Voltaire APPLAUDS

Poemae Qui Aperio.

I initially thought that it was the memories of the events and how they had made me feel when they happened that was the major source of the pain I felt. I think that I understand a bit more about where some of my decisions have led me. I also think that I have a lot that I’ve yet to understand.

In my teenage years, I thought a lot about taking my own life. I think, at some point, most teenagers do. Now as an adult, I realize that in a way I did. I was thinking about it and I think that anger, other people, the cosmos, and also God influence some suicides. Other influences are deep heartaches and suicide seems like the only thing that will stop the pain. Some of us don’t end our mortal lives though; we just stop living, which is another kind of suicide. I think that those of us who have gone unnoticed, disregarded, ignored or have been hurt in other ways are the ones that have the highest probability of arriving at the outer edges of the spectrum. That’s what happens when your soul has so many footprints on it.

Sometimes people would convince me that they would catch me if I let go and it was just a trap and then they would all laugh at me while I lay on the ground bleeding. It seemed like choosing to stop living and never again take any chances was a much better choice than to live face down in the dirt buried by immoral laughter. I don’t think that I stopped living all at once; I think it happened piece by piece over time. Some of it happened from having to listen to a silent scream that came from deep within my heart that was so painfully loud that kept saying, “pick me”.

I also think that everyone has a part of themselves they are not particularly fond of. They carry that part of themselves around like a weight. The part of myself that I am not fond of is the part that hurts or abandons other people because I immediately assume that they will or think that they have hurt me when they won’t or haven’t. I think it is the fortunate ones that realize that when the weight gets too heavy, they have a choice. They can choose to set it down. Once they have set it down they gain the ability to see things the way they really are. I think I am maybe starting to see things a bit differently because I have set it down, but I don’t think I have let go of the handles yet and I may need a bit more time before I can walk away from it completely. It is really hard though to let go of something that you feel saved your life.

It’s rare to even find people willing to be this honest — much less those who actually do so…

It strikes me that the above is precisely the world Jesus came into to transform: A world filled with people who, while still living, have already committed suicide. A world where the living dead walk around with deep bootprints on their hearts, the unholy laughter of evil ringing in their ears and an oppressive sense of having deserved all of the above.

It’s called shame…

The message He came to deliver? It’s simple: “I can see you, I love you and I can heal you if you’ll let Me. It’s time to bring your heart out to play in the community of all the other people I’ve already raised from the dead.”

And yes, they are out there — mostly in coffee shops, pubs and living-rooms where people gather in His name. They are found where hungry hearts seek to love and be loved and where those who have given up on the rules seek to know and be known by others anyway. They hang out with the broken, the humbled and sometimes the tipsy in places where the, “Righteous,” rarely dare to tread for fear they would look anything but. They are found with the outcasts, the free thinkers, the lovers and the mystics — with the people who would rather dance before Him then seek to quantify Him.

Yes, they are difficult to spot — but can always be found by heart for, in their presence, judgment fades away. They are people who know they are absolutely perfect, holy and infinitely lovable — and see you that way too.

Rarely, they may even be found in the bricks and mortar church. But, it’s easy to spot them there — taking heavy fire as they fight to change it….

Let me be blunt: Any Canadian who does not desire to live in a police surveillance state should probably check this out.

The legislation itself:
Bill C-46:
Bill C-47:

Here’s three dudes who need a note from you:

The Prime Minister of Canada (Steven Harper): harper.s@parl.gc.ca
The guy who sold his soul (Peter Van Loan): vanloan.p@parl.gc.ca
Whoever your MP is: Search

It should probably look something like this: (My MP is Harper)

Dear Mr. Steven Harper and Mr. Peter Van Loan,

I believe that the introduction of legislation which will allow Canadian police to access personal information about the sender or receiver of any electronic message without a warrant is an extremely dangerous and foolish direction for our country to be moving in. I further believe that forcing business (Internet Service Providers) to become the 24/7/365 watchdogs and surveillance system of a society violates the reasonable expectation of privacy that any free society is based upon and creates a culture of fear and paranoia only matched by that of the former Soviet Union.

The very foundation of any democratically based free-society is the expectation of a system of restraints placed upon law enforcement (and those who wield power in general) based upon an understanding that no one is incorruptible. History has always proven that the absence of said restraints always creates a police state for everyone can be tempted to justify their own means if the end is sufficiently believed in. Placing the balance of effort upon law enforcement to prove that surveillance is necessary and then the burden of effort required to effect such upon their own limited resources ensures that said surveillance is only used where truly necessary.

Laws of this nature (C-64 & C-47) are always advanced under one fundamental line of logic: We must maintain the security of our free society from those who would destroy it.

While there may be some security benefit to this legislation, the effect of said legislation is, in and of itself, always a tearing apart of the fundamental freedoms that any free society is based upon to gain such — given that those powers are always handled by corruptible persons. Persons who can be bought or who, for ideological reasons, come to see this power through the lens of, “We can use this to stamp out what we don’t like or what costs us money.” (The villain of the day could be violent video games, offensive statements, religious ideas or simply the control of behavior for profit.) The end result of that security is a loss of freedom which ultimately destroys that which it claims to protect.

Franklin stated: “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”

C-64 & C-47 are the granting of inordinate power to persons who must always be considered suspect if a free and just society is to be maintained. I believe they have NO place in our country.

If there is truly any need for our private details to be accessed, a judge will see that and grant a warrant so that the police may collect those details — all by themselves.

–
Yours Truly,
Cal H. Henze, M.A.

Poemae Qui Aperio

I’ve learned that it is all of these beliefs
That they are making a prisoner out of me
I am the one who has created these walls
Now I am feeling like I want to break free

I’ve learned that even though I was living
I know that I’ve been dying to feel alive
I can say that I want more this time around
I’m starting to feel like I want to survive

I’ve learned that there is so much more
And this part of me that I thought had died
Now wants to come out and experience life
And convince me that I don’t need to hide

I’ve learned that things are not as they seem
And the lies that I was taught are not true
I am not the bad person that I thought I was
I’m a good person that bad things happened to

© Copyright www.poemaequiaperio.com

The entire site deserves a read.

It’s a single-author blog site filled with poetry from a person who, evidently, experienced some incredible abuse and is coming through it to some significant healing. If you start with the first poem (Down at the bottom) and then read them in order, they read like a road map of growth and transformation.

GraceAndMercy.org

Church history demonstrates that believers in every generation become enslaved to a performance basis for earning God’s approval and blessing. In other words, they believe they are right with God because they do the right things. This is a constant temptation for all who desire to please God. [...] I’ll be using the term performance basis interchangeably with the term legalism.

Because performance-based living is so deeply rooted in human nature, the entire world, not just the Christian world, is filled with people who either thrive on it or who are constantly striving to extricate themselves from it. But apart from the applied grace of God – the exact opposite of performance-based living – nothing more than superficial relief is ever realized by anyone, Christian or not.

The really entertaining thing about these guys is their background: They are specialists in bringing people out of cults. They have launched this site to take on fundamentalist Evangelical legalism — using those same skills. (See their first post)

From where I’m sitting, it looks to be about time…