If you spend any time reading Evangelical Christian websites, blogs, or news sites, you will likely read things like:
- Making same-sex marriage legal will destroy America.
- Removing prayer, Bible reading, and the Ten Commandments from public schools will cause moral decline.
- Allowing abortion to continue will cause God to pour out his judgment and wrath on America.
- Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born liberal, socialist, communist Muslim who plans to institute Sharia Law, set up death panels, and arrest Christians. Besides, he’s black and his middle name is Hussein.
- Rock music is Satan’s music and listening to it open up your mind to demonic oppression and possession.
- ISIS is setting up camps in the U.S.
- Federal government is planning to invade and take over Texas
- Jesus is coming soon.
- The rapture, it could happen today.
- Atheists, agnostics, humanists, Buddhists, Hindus, Shintoists, Taoists, pagans, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists, liberal Christians, Roman Catholics, and anyone else who is not an Evangelical will go to hell when they die. God will then fit them with a body that is capable of withstanding fire and torment, and then he will torture them for eternity.
What do all these things have in common? Fear! Fear is the fuel that powers the Evangelical machine. Without it, Evangelicalism dies. The fear-mongering tends to increase when a Democrat is president, and since Barack Obama is a Demoncrat and he is a descendent of Ham and Ishmael, fear levels are at an all time high.
Fear also generates donations. Without fear, Evangelical church members are less likely to give money to their church. Parachurch groups like Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Parent Television Council, Liberty Counsel, American Center for Law and Justice, Home School Legal Defense Association, Alliance Defending Freedom, Concerned Women For America, Faith & Freedom Coalition, American Right to Life, Eagle Forum, National Organization for Marriage, Christian Coalition of America, Operation Rescue, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality,Worldnet Daily, and Oath Keepers, along with thousands of Evangelical church and pastors, use fear to motivate the faithful to give their money to God, God being the church and parachurch organization. And every night, on millions of Evangelical TV screens, Faux News, Pat Robertson, John Hagee, Rod Parsley, Franklin Graham, Jack Van Impe, and James Robison stir the fear pot, hoping the fearful Evangelicals will give them money.
Fear the blacks, fear the browns, fear the homosexuals, fear the atheists….and keep them donations coming.
Every day, it is something new to fear. In today’s American Family Association’s action alert, the new fear is unrestricted Wi-Fi at McDonald’s and Starbucks. According to Donna Rice Hughes, CEO of Enough is Enough and the woman who was accused of banging Presidential hopeful Gary Hart, there are predators and pedophiles lurking at your local McDonald’s and Starbucks. Here’s some of what Hughes had to say:
At many restaurants and stores, free public Wi-Fi comes with your morning coffee or your child’s Happy Meal. While the convenience of this connectivity allows many to work or surf the net for fun at public cafés or fast food joints, a growing number of people use public Wi-Fi to view pornography.
With public Wi-Fi serving as an unwitting channel for pornography to creep into our children’s field of vision and attracting felons – all in public squares – large corporations continue to ignore the public outcry for change. A growing movement, National P*rn Free Wi-Fi Campaign, has been calling on Starbucks and McDonald’s as early as March 2014 to filter their Wi-Fi networks…
…So what’s the big deal with unfiltered public Wi-Fi? What happens if Starbucks and McDonald’s doesn’t do something to make their networks safer?
Imagine teenage girls chatting over a Frappuccino after school, just one table over from someone browsing sexually explicit materials. Children in the play area can be just five feet from a man, sitting in plain view, watching pornographic films. These are not simply potential scenarios; they have already happened.
Perhaps more dangerous is that, according to federal officers, the anonymity of public Wi-Fi attracts criminals to engage in sexual solicitation of children and trafficking of child pornography right there in public places. On December 29, 2014, USA Today reported the arrest of a registered sex offender while he was allegedly downloading child pornography at a Hillsboro, Washington Starbucks…
…he availability of unfiltered public Wi-Fi also means that children and teenagers whose parents turn on filtering controls on their home internet service can bypass those parental controls and freely access pornographic materials in public. Even when they are not looking for explicit material, a misspelling on search engines could expose them to images or otherwise lead them to pornographic sites – everything from adult pornography (the kind of images that appear in Playboy and Penthouse) to federally prosecutable obscene material depicting graphic sex acts, live sex shows, orgies, bestiality and violence. Even illegal content depicting the actual sexual abuse of a child (child pornography) — once only found on the black market — is instantly available and accessible on the Internet…
…Unfiltered public Wi-Fi poses real threat to our society, and it’s high time that businesses take measures to make their Wi-Fi policies family-friendly and safe for their customers…
…A mom brings her kids to get a Happy Meal, and there’s a man in an adjoining booth enjoying hard-core pornography or even child pornography? Law enforcement reports this has happened. If parents understood that strangers can view hard-core pornography and child pornography in front of their kids in these establishments, I believe they would join us in saying, “Enough is enough!”…
Has anyone ever sat in a public restaurant or coffee shop and used free Wi-Fi to look at porn? Sure. But, more than a few Evangelical pastors have used their church’s Wi-Fi/internet service to look at porn too. Should we demand that all churches be required to have porn blocking filters on their internet service? Why are people like Hughes not outraged over porn surfing pastors?
There are likely more predators and pedophiles in the church house than there is at McDonald’s or Starbucks. Ask the Family Research Council about resident pervert Josh Duggar. And dare we mention the Catholic church sex scandals, the Southern Baptist and Independent Fundamentalist Baptist sex scandals? American Christian churches and parachurch groups are infested with men (and a few women) who are sexual predators, yet Donna Rice Hughes and the American Family Association is worried about someone viewing a porn site at the home of Ronald McDonald?
While I am sure somewhere in America someone is now using McDonald’s or Starbucks free Wi-Fi to gaze at pornography, I highly doubt that it “poses a real threat to our society.” This is little more than shaking the Evangelical money tree hoping some cash shakes free.
It’s not up to businesses to make sure that children and teenagers responsibly use free Wi-Fi. If people like Hughes are so afraid that their children are going to catch a glimpse of a YouPorn video or Victoria’s Secret’s website, then I suggest they keep their children near them at all time. I suggest that they not allow them to take their smartphone or tablet outside their porn-safe home. It is up to PARENTS to make sure their children and teenagers don’t see things that are inappropriate. It’s up to PARENTS to make sure their children and teenagers use the internet and public Wi-Fi responsibly.
Businesses that offer free Wi-Fi have the ability to control what kind of sites can be viewed on their network. It takes all of five minutes to set up OPEN DNS or some other filtering software. Should businesses use filtering on their public network? Probably, but if they don’t, then parents have to be PARENTS and make sure their children and teenagers can’t access inappropriate material. It’s not the businesses fault or Obama’s faul if 13-year-old Johnny uses public Wi-Fi to look at porn or catch a quick glimpse of a scantily clad model. If a parent wants to make sure Johnny lives in a porn-free world, I suggest they NEVER allow him to use a computer or smartphone.
The real issue I have here is with Hughes’s fear-mongering. I seriously doubt this is a problem, and Hughes provides no evidence that McDonald’s or Starbucks has a sexual predator or customer porn surfing problem. I’ve never walked into a McDonald’s and wondered if there were perverts sitting there watching porn, hoping they will have the opportunity to sexually molest someone’s child in the McDonald’s restroom. I have, however, walked into Christian churches and wondered if there were any sexual predators working in junior church or the nursery.
We have house-wide Wi-Fi access at our house. We have a main router/access point, two access points, and two Apple Airport Express. This weekend, there will be over 20 people in our home and many of them will have a tablet or smartphone. They will most likely use our Wi-Fi to access the internet. Because a teenager, several children, and my daughter with Down Syndrome will have access to our Wi-Fi, I use OPEN DNS to block certain sites. You see, that’s what a responsible grandparent and parent does. I’m not waiting for the government or Time Warner to block these sites.
It’s up to the adult internet user to determine what is appropriate. Donna Rice Hughes likely considers the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition to be pornographic. I don’t. She’s free to block any site that she thinks is inappropriate, as I am I and every other internet user. We have all the tools we need to block whatever it is we don’t want our children to see. (or our husband, wife, or pastor)
Perhaps the real reason that Donna Rice Hughes wants to block internet access is so no teenage boy ever has an opportunity to see:
i think the legal landscape for starbucks et al is more complicated than that. i vaguely remember reading about various lawsuits in the early days of internet (eg, aol, bbs, etc) about this.
a magazine is responsible for libel at other things it prints, because it selects what to print and what to leave out. however, the post office and the telephone company are not responsible if their facilities are used by someone in a crime (eg, libel, slander, etc, etc). as i recall, in the early cases re: the internet, the question was whether internet service providers would be subject to lawsuits like a newspaper, or like a common-carrier phone company. and the outcome hinged upon… whether the service provider made any attempt to control the content! (i think transportation is also subject to similar concepts. if you’re a common carrier bus or truck company you have different liability than a company owned truck that chooses what to put inside a truck.)
so, my guess is that if starbucks does any filtering, they’d cease to be considered a common carrier re: limited liability, and would hence open themselves up to liability for any content that goes across that network — kiddie porn, slander/libel, copyright infringement, harassment, etc. ain’t nobody got time for that!
no deep legal expertise, plus a lot of vague and old memories, so do more research if you’re interested. but the overall point is, that there is probably a lot of legal liability issues that impact this, and the “obvious” common sense approach isn’t as clear as it looks. perhaps the legal system needs to be updated, but these general concepts were hashed out re: newspapers, radio, tv stations, magazines, post office, delivery services, trucking companies, etc, over decades, and there’s a lot of case law involved, and the legal system doesn’t seem to move very fast (and when it does, i suspect it doesn’t act wisely.)
and like you, i think it’s mostly fear mongering. airports have sold porn magazines at the kiosks for years, so someone on your plane to disney world might be looking at porn. and people could store porn on their phone at home, and view it while at starbucks. or look at it right before going to starbucks. porn exists. christians look at porn too. put your big girl panties on, and focus on some substantive issues instead of trying boss everyone else around re: basic human sex drives between consenting adults. and when a pedophile is caught, don’t excuse them just because they’re a christian or a pastor.
Oh woww! I have wondered what happened to sexy Donna! Looks like she’s gone from the Left-wing with Gary to the lunatic fringe on the Right!
Actually, pedophiles and those who support them seem to have been hanging out at the Duggar’s household, their church, and the Family Research Council.
Ha ha! Years ago at the Richmond Outreach Center we had a guy who worked on all the computers. When he left the new IT guy found literally hundreds of discs filled with what? Yep, nothing but porn! This church also has the former founder/Pastor Geronimo Aguliar going to trial next month in Texas for what charges? Yep, having sex with 2 underage females.
So the whole “outrage” she has is purely fear mongering. I always trip when people who used to do some bad stuff (like her) get “holy” (like her) then want to point out the wrong doing of others….kinda like a former smoker berating a smoker….irritating as hell!
I remember not long after Gary Hart dropped out of the presidential race that I and a friend of mine were looking at a picture of Donna Rice in her bathing suit. My friend made an astute comment: “Who the hell wants to be president when you can have that?!”
She is so full of shit! Doesn’t she know that most people have unfiltered access to the Internet through their cell phone service provider? They could still sit in McDonald’s and access porn even without free WiFi.
I find the expressed imaginings of a person who represses their sexuality to be maddening.
There is nothing to fear but fear itself. The more who realize this the closer to equality we all will be.