stopping child molestation | Good Morning Birmingham

Tim Gratz responded to the Monroe County School District part of yesterday’s Easter bunny preceedings, Florida Keys and elsewhere post:

From: keyscoalition@live.com
To: keysmyhome@hotmail.com
CC: connie@cyberhenge.com
Subject: Connie & Keys Coalition article
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2012 16:29:41 -0700

http://keysnews.com/node/36736

Connie had asked me to send you this link to her article in the Key West Citizen.

Your blog today about the MCSD was certainly powerful (as usual)

Best

TIM

From: keysmyhome@hotmail.com
To: keyscoalition@live.com
Subject: RE: Connie & Keys Coalition article
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2012 21:14:23 -0400

I liked better the “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” review, and the little Johnny story about how his father kept his mother from going to heaven. Writing about the school district seems endlessly futile, like most of the topics I write about. I still feel, subject to angel override or new developments, that I have given child sex trafficking my best shot. I still view it as horrible, but not nearly as prevalent as child molestation, which is pandemic in America and in the Keys, and, I imagine, most places on this world. The angels told me and my 6th wife that Jesus was molested by Mary, and then he and she came and confirmed it. I was enraged, not over the news, but over the fact it had been suppressed. Because of my training, I knew suppression of that unpleasantness had wreaked havoc in the collective psyche of Christendom, and pretty soon I understood it explained why Jesus caved in to Mary at the wedding and made more wine out of water, after the host ran out of wine, the first reported miracle. That paved the way for more miracles, onto which Christendom latched a lot harder than it latched onto Jesus’ teachings and how he lived, which led, it sure looks to me, to the miracle of easy and instant salvation, which was so much easier for the early church to peddle than the path Jesus walked and told others to follow suit. The path Francis of Assisi, for example, later took, after it was pretty much imposed on him after he came out of a killer dark night of the soul. Francis believed Jesus was celibate, the Pope believed it, Christendom believed it, but he was not. If Magdalene washed his feet with her tears and hair and precious ointment she scarce could afford in public, what did she wash him with in private? Who was the first person he spoke to after he came out of the tomb? Who did he tell to go to the men and tell them she had seen him and he said he would be with them shortly? Imagine the mess the Church’s portrayal of Jesus as celibate made in the collective psyche of Christendom. Imagine the bleed-through from that into child molestation, sex trafficking, pedophile priests. I see no way to even slow down what you and Connie so much do not like. It’s too widespread to slow it down. All I see is trying to help people who want to try to recover from it, who want out, ask for help, etc.

From: keyscoalition@live.com
To: keysmyhome@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: Connie & Keys Coalition article
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2012 23:59:34 -0700

We think that going after on-line pimps can slow it down albeit not stop it entirely. Had you read that Goldman Sachs held a significant minority interest in Village Voice Media which it quickly dvested after Nicholas Kristof started to investigate the ownership of VVM?
We’d previously discussed the clear relationship between childhood sexual abuse and trafficked children and you are indeed correct that the former is more prevlent than the latter. Working to stop sexual abuse thus is not only important in itself but also helps prevent trafficking.
And you are correct that it is important to provide necesary services to survivors but that is not a role for the Coalition other than directing people who want to help to organizations that do, eg Kristi House in Miami, and Covenant House.

Re the schools, not only are finances and a top heavy bureacracy a huge problem so I think is the success rate in teaching students basic skills eg reading. I first became aware of this through attendance at the Childrens Movement Rally. The percentage of tenth grade students who perform poorly on reading tests is appalling, as I am sure you know.

From: keysmyhome@hotmail.com
To: keyscoalition@live.com
CC: connie@cyberhenge.com
Subject: RE: Connie & Keys Coalition article
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2012 09:20:02 -0400

Hi, Tim

Sadly, what you are going after is ancient and part of humanity, and you have about much chance of slowing it down as you have of slowing Lucifer down. And the part you are going after is a mosquito compared to an elephant, which is child molestation, which also is ancient and is part of humanity. I found myself thinking after writing to you yesterday, that I had left out education as a preventative and/or way of intervening. School children need very frank instruction in this area, and where they can go for help, safely. I still feel you and Connie have taken up this cause for reasons very personal to you both, and you are not in the clear about the reality and futlity of what you want to put and end to, or even slow down. I have a great deal of experience with people who get into crusades. I have yet to meet one person into a crusade, who was in the clear, dispassionate. All of them were projecting, and the ones who came to see that then had something far more immediately pressing to deal with – their own soul wounding. As I told you before, to which you did not respond, I wrote two books about this quite a while ago now: THE HIGH LEGAL ROAD: A New Approach to Legal Problems, and Prisons & Freedom. I told you writing the first of those two books changed my entire perspective of everything. I told you the two books were long out of print, but I sometimes saw them advertised at online used bookstores. I recommend you and Connie obtain and read both of those books, in the order they are mentioned above.

Sloan

P.S.

Yes, school children are not learning as well as they could, and this school district inflates its results. I continue to maintain the problem lies in the teaching method, which is college prep based, and boring to lots of students, and does not take into account each student’s individuality and soul interest [and molests their souls]. To rectify that will require scrapping the American education model entirely, which I don’t see happening.

From: keyscoalition@live.com
To: keysmyhome@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: Connie & Keys Coalition article
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2012 06:49:16 -0700

I have read you on that issue before and I am in substantial agreement.

Seems to me that our school district should look at what has worked in other districts, a pretty logical way to look for avenues of or approaches to improvement.

I promise I will [read your books]. Connie and I can share the books.

I certainly agree that sin, prostitution and slavery are as old as the hills.

FYI I disagree with organizations and websites that claim as a goal the end of modern day slavery. I don’t think we will ever wipe it from the face of the globe. But I think we can work to significantly reduce it. Child abuse is harder since it so often happens in the privacy of the home.

Re motivation, I am involved for several reasons. One is that I have a daughter as young as some of the victims. I first became aware of child prostitution in 2007 (but then only in third world countries). The film about William Wilberforce brought focus to the issue. I then discovered that my birthday fell on the anniversary of the end of the slave trade in England and I took that (rightly or wrongly) as a message to me that I should get involved in the fight. I helped organize an anti-trafficking rally at the Key West High School on the 20th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in England.

You may not recall but I had been in Sugarloaf doing organizational work for that rally and was waiting for the bus with my daughter when you were kind enough to give us a ride to Key West.

I think one of the motivations of crusaders is the desire to want to be part of a cause that has accomplished something good for society. In fact the head of the International Justice Mission uses that as a recruiting technique in a video I have seen. It shows the civil rights marches and he says to the effect maybe you wish you could have been around then, to be part of a movement that brought great social change to this country. He then goes on to compare the antitrafficking campaign to the civil rights movement of the sixties. I like to play that video because it means something to me.

I know we will all feel good if we think our efforts may have helped rescue even one victim or prevent even one case from occuring.

And if we really got in to prevention that would involve things of great value in themselves, such as mentoring kids from difficult environments, working on good foster homes, participating in the guardian ad liem program etc.

Best and I will read your books.

TIM

From: keysmyhome@hotmail.com
To: keyscoalition@live.com
CC: connie@cyberhenge.com
Subject: RE: Connie & Keys Coalition article
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2012 10:09:18 -0400

Still looks to me you are concentrating on the tiny, and it still looks to me you are looking outward, instead of inward. Something unfortunate unresolved in your past life on the mainland is in play, Tim. Same for Connie.

FYI, yesterday, I added a new page to goodmorningbirmigham.com, which you are supposed to be able to reach by clicking on this link: Easter preceedings at my mother’s church – St. Luke’s Episcopal. Related in some ways to our correspndence re child molestation, it is not for the faint of heart.

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