While doing my lazy workout on the stationery bike in the basement today, I watched a recorded Anderson show from last week. The subject for discussion was a current case in New York about a Mommy Madam being held in Rikers Jail with a set bail of $2 million because of charges against her for allegedly running a high-end prostitution ring.
Normally this is not the kind of news I want to wake up to. Normally it's the kind of news I would switch past and try to erase from memory because the idea of discussing the dark deviations of sex outside of marriage is something I can't stomach. Nor was it a subject I ever saw myself turning towards rather than away from.
This weekend all that changed.
This weekend I was among hundreds of attendees at the Justice Summit, a day of educational and empowering presentations, workshops, and testimonies from heroes of the faith who were willing to not turn away, willing to not click away when they were presented with the realities of millions of lives exploited through sexual slavery.
The statistics are staggering, the realities difficult to comprehend when tucked inside the safe comforts of suburbia while living under a judicial system that strives for equal justice for every human being. Even while hearing the truth, the details seem like a horror story too terrible to be true.
Until you see the faces.
Until you see the faces of young women and boys, of a 6 year old girl working a lollipop between a seductively rolling tongue on a street corner, faces that are sold and traded and abducted as soul-filled sex toys, they are merely a statistic. But when you see the small faces and tiny bodies of your own daughters mirrored in the images of these victims, your heart bleeds as you discern that the profound difference between them is evident when you look into their eyes...
Broken spirits looking out from behind invisible chains.
So today, I did not turn away. I tried to listen and ascertain what my own country, my own culture, my own peers would have to say about a mother charged with the abetting of depraved activity. I tried to fit what I had heard on Saturday, that everyone used for sex is a victim, with what I saw today, present day call girls advocating for the right to willingly participate in this personal abuse.
When the audience applauded one former madam's admission that she would take cash or credit card, that she would take the profit any which way it came, I wondered that they didn't recognize that the true price was paid from deep within a woman's soul, a deposit dredged up from the constant emptying of her spirit.
Today I did not turn away from what made me uncomfortable. Today I did not shy away from the terror of injustice.
Today I decided that while there are still mommy madams, as sure as the hell their victims live in, there will be mommy advocates.
I will be among the relative few who no longer refuse to go there, who no longer opt out of acquainting myself with their grief and sharing in their suffering. I will be among the few opposing the many who justify all sorts of perverse sexual entertainment without seeing their justifications of personal pleasure and profit as a choke-hold of injustice against their playthings and their prey.
So listen up, you madams and pimps and johns, it is time for you to recognize that your days are numbered. It is time for you to meet the new women in town, the ones you may address respectfully as Mommy Madame Abolitionist.
We are the mothers of sons and daughters who will teach our children about the divine beauty of sex and about the honor the act demands. We will educate our children about the monsters who would prey on them, preparing them now for freedom that you will not steal away.
And for the many voiceless victims that you now hold in your grip, we will pursue and we will pray. We will fight to eradicate slavery and bring just recompense to those who stole away the justice of millions.
Even against such staggering statistics, the odds are in our favor as we have the Father of all on our side.
This Mom and Pops team, this mobilization of God's children, we're ready and coming for you. So be forewarned, because it's already been promised that not even the gates of hell can nor will prevail against us...
