Russia's Fight to End Pornography - World Congress of Families

Another report from Angela! The World Congress of Families ended last weekend but there was so much good information that Angela will be going through her notes and writing more reports about the presentations she attended to share with us.

One of the difficult things about WCF is choosing which presentations to attend, because they are all amazing. One of the many neat stories that came out of Friday was from the Russian delegation. As I reported previously, Russia is rising and they are becoming a force for good around the world. This also includes hosting World Congress of Families 2014 in Moscow at the Kremlin. They expect 5000 representatives from 80 countries and from around Russia to be a part of this historic Congress. Isn’t it incredible and ironic that where there once was Communism, there will now be the world’s largest pro-religion, pro-family Congress? As I said before, Russia is rising!

I wish I could describe the feelings I had of the goodness of the Russian delegation. They are intent on protecting and defending traditional marriage and children and have been working tirelessly to do so. They inspired us! One of the presentations was lead by Alexey Komov and a young Russian aristocrat and prince named Hilarion (last name unavailable at the moment). In an effort to combat child pornography on Russia’s Internet, they worked with several organizations and volunteers in Russia to form the Safe Internet League.
The Safe Internet League notes these disturbing statistics from the past decade:

• Sexual content involving children on the Internet has grown 2,500%
• In the same period, sexual violence against children increased 3,000%
• The United Nations reports that the United States, Russia and Thailand lead in the growth of illegal web content (promoting pornography, prostitution and drug trafficking)
• Almost 20% of Russian Internet users are children under 15-years-of-age. More than 4 million Russian children (ages 7 to 15) have unlimited access to the Internet, 24 hours a day.
• Close to 90% of Russian parents with children 6 to 12 years of age, are unaware of the risks associated with the Internet or how to protect their families from the same.

The Safe Internet League have created a grassroots movement including “cyber guards”, who recently uncovered Russia’s largest internet pornography ring. They are shutting down and blacklisting harmful sights on a daily basis while providing free internet filters for the families of Russia. Hilarion said that they “do not want to put their children in a sea and tell them to go swim with the sharks.” I loved that analogy and think it can be used with any number of issues with protecting children!

These free internet filters started just recently (April 2013) and they found 500,000 sites that were safe for children. Their end goal? To have 3 million sites that are safe for children. How do they do this? It’s called “White Internet” and they are building an algorithm to control and shut down pornography sites. Alexey Komov concluded that, “There is a sickness around the world and we hope that we will be the cure.”

Here is the link to their website but it is in Russian: http://www.ligainternet.ru/

Thanks, Angela! Iceland already bans pornography in its country and is trying to also ban internet pornography from being accessed in Iceland. They are a great example of doing good to protect children. Unfortunately there are many decrying "foul" because their freedom of speech is being infringed upon. You can read more about Iceland's endeavors here.

There are groups here in America who are also trying to fight pornography. A few include: Women for Decency, Morality in Media, and Fight the New Drug.

© 2007-2012 Chocolate on my Cranium, LLC all rights reserved

How Do You Organize Your Photos?

My current project - creating photo books to be printed. It is a HUGE project! Because of my digital camera I have taken more pictures than ever. Unfortunately, I have very little pictures actually printed. Thus my goal to at least get a few photo books. I was able to get a couple of good deals from Zulily not to long ago - an 8x8 20 page book for $10 and an 8x11 20 page book for $15 courtesy of Shutterfly. Those have to be ordered by the end of May. I also received a voucher for a free 8x8 20 page book from my credit card to be redeemed at Shutterfly by June 9th.

Those books are on hold though because I am busily, hurriedly trying to get all of last year's photos together in a 100 page book. They are on sale at Winkflash for only $25! But it ends today {Tuesday, May 21}. The sale has been extended until next Tuesday, May 28th!! Use code: ALLBOOKS. Normally 100 page photo books are over $100 so this is a terrific deal. I am kicking myself for not being on top of my photo organization though. It is taking way too long to sift through all those pictures.

Which prompts me to ask you, do you organize your photos? Do you regularly print them out? Or are you like me and have a gazillion stored on your hard drive with only a few actually printed out? If you do print yours out what's your secret for keeping on top of it?

© 2007-2012 Chocolate on my Cranium, LLC all rights reserved

Going Home

Friday morning I took pictures of the scenery as I came home from town. It had rained the day before so the desert plants were coming to life. It's amazing how just a little rain makes a big difference out here in the desert. It may not look like much but to those of us that live here it is a beautiful sight when we see any color other than a variation of brown.

Turning onto the dirt road for home - only thirteen more miles to go!

This is the top of the pass. All you can see below are sand dunes. We call that view "The Land of Desolation."

Coming down the mountain all you see are the sand dunes to your left until you crest a small hill and all of a sudden green pivots of hay!

The road makes a turn between two pivots. This is where you can see mountains in front and the rear view mirror captures the mountains behind.

After several more miles I make the final turn onto the last stretch of road for home.

Saturday we had some more rain which resulted in a beautiful and very bright rainbow. My sister-in-law captured the view from her house. Look! Our house is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!

© 2007-2012 Chocolate on my Cranium, LLC all rights reserved

The Modern French Revolution - World Congress of Families Day 02

This is an amazing story! Why haven't we heard about it before here in America? I'm not sure but you are learning about it now. Feel free to share this post!

The Modern French Revolution

A brilliant story has the delegates at the WCF buzzing. I mentioned the French rallies for marriage and family briefly in the first day’s report but I have some more detail that is absolutely fascinating and worth going into detail. As many of you may know, a gay marriage and adoption bill is being presented to French Parliament but the people took to the streets in protest in unprecedented numbers (1 million people marching Paris at EACH rally).

In fact, these rallies are historic in that they are the largest in French history, and likely world history for this particular social issue. Maxime Legoce, a young Frenchman who had the opportunity to speak in between sessions, was a significant player in the French rallies in Paris and around the world. He gave several speeches on his experiences and one was titled, “The French Movement for Defending Marriage and Leadership in the 21st Century.” I hope my reporting does it justice, and more importantly, I hope Maxime’s morally courageous story of the La Manif Pour Tous (“Demonstration for All”) pro-family movement gets shared around the world. It is inspiring!

The organizers of these highly successful rallies in France, along with other French citizens around the world, were predominantly made up of young people. This is fascinating not only because they are young but also because they live in a relatively agnostic and secular country. When people heard about these pro-family movements around the world, they were shocked and couldn’t figure out why the French youth would be so passionate about marriage and the family unit. But this is proof that there is much “hope smiling brightly before us” with the rising French generation.

Why were these high school and university age youth the driving force for protesting gay marriage and gay adoption? The answer lies in the history of their parents. The May 1968 French “Sexual Revolution” created a generation of mass divorce, abortion, broken homes and families, euthanasia, drop in education and so forth. The young people of 2013 have experienced firsthand what these negative social “freedoms” did to their families and home life. They were damaged by their parents’ and grandparents’ destructive social behaviors and they wanted to get rid of it. With the mass divorce, these children felt that they were the victims and needed to take action. They are taking a stand against the very things their parents fought for in the 1960’s.

How did the cause for marriage and family in France gain so much support and traction? Maxime said that the movement was all carried out through the power of social media and people who were passionate about this cause. Here are a few things they did that made it so successful:

1. Social Media: Very low cost advertising and potential to go viral very quickly. Where we used to have to place ads in the newspaper or on television at great financial expense, they are able to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other French social media outlets to get the word for countless rallies and demonstrations of support very quickly to a lot of people. The “La Manif Pour Tous” Movement Facebook Page is highly successful and there are a lot of neat photos that inspire people to get involved.
2. They used creative ways to engage people. For instance, one movement included encouraging everyone to change their Wifi name to “No Gay Marriage”. Whenever neighbors would be searching for Wifi access or logging into their system, anyone made this change would show up. Maxime said he changed his one night and the next day, his neighbors all changed theirs. It created an underground resistance movement.
3. They had a very easy to remember, non-religious slogan to reach all people across the board: “1 Father, 1 Mother = That’s Marriage”, “Father, Mother, Children, It’s Natural!” and also “La Manif Pour Tous which means The Demonstration for All” and this is a play on words for the pro-gay marriage side whose slogan is “Marriage for All”.

4. Blogging. There is a huge network of Catholic bloggers around the world that are all organized under the “Catholicsphere” (a narrower version of the “blogosphere”).
5. They made it cool to show their pro-family T-shirts, sweatshirts, bumper stickers, flags, banners etc.
   
6. For people who were physically unable to come to Paris to march, they created the first ever E-march online. This was absolutely brilliant in that they used geo-localization with IP addresses to create a heat map of all those virtually attending the rally online (pictured below).

7. They encouraged everyone to go viral fast and furiously with any updates or information on what was happening on the ground during the rallies. For instance, the media and police said there were only about 300,000 people (only? That still seems huge!) at one of the rallies where they absolutely had over a million people total. Everyone was tweeting or Facebooking images to debunk this false information by the pro-gay marriage media.
8. Technology Allows For Immediate Reactivity. Prime example: at one of the rallies (all peaceful mind you), police decided to take 70 people into custody. What did they immediately do? They tweeted photos of them in the police vans and posted pictures on Facebook asking for help. By the time they reached the police station, there were already supporters there. The supporters grew and within only two hours, the police released all 70 people.
   
   Another interesting thing happened with the police and the media manipulation. The photos they showed on the news were doctored to show far less people supporting the pro-family rally. However, as soon as these photos showed up on the news, people started submitting real time photos proving that not only did the media edited out tens of thousands of people, but they also photo shopped existing trees and lamps and parts of the boulevard, which automatically proved they were trying to cover up the real numbers at the rally.
   
   
   
   One part of their rallies that was highly effective was their use of “flash mobs” using car parades. They would randomly pick and then list a certain street online for supporters to jump in their cars and drive down the street waving pro-family flags. Other rallies would be huge signs draped over the many bridges of Paris or in front of hotels or government buildings where members of Parliament are scheduled to visit. The La Manif Pour Tous movement call it the “welcoming committee”.
9. Technology Supports Generosity. Not only were supporters able to donate money to the cause, but they were able to use social media to donate things and services to help make it easier for people able to attend the rallies. For instance, people living in Paris would offer accommodation for those who lived in the country and didn’t have the money for a hotel. Other people would offer carpooling to the rallies, while others would offer babysitting or meals. The kindness of strangers quickly turned these people into friends. That’s the beauty and generosity of the human spirit!

I know I wasn’t the only one at WCF who was touched by Maxime’s story and I hope that we can use these powerful tools for future rallies and events. I know there are great opportunities here for learning and implementation. I hope we can have more Maxime’s and La Manif Pour Tous movements around the world where gay marriage and adoption bills are coming into the picture. Let’s share my new friend’s story with everyone and also remember it when we start hearing of whisperings of gay marriage bills (or other social issues) coming to our states and countries. Let’s act and follow the example of the French and this brilliant and successful movement.

Here is an inspiring short clip with footage from the rallies (it made me want to go to France to support them on May 26 for their next rally!) :

Here is the website, La Manif Pour Tous. It’s a fantastic template for others who want to start movements in their state or country:

Candlelight vigils every evening by high school and university students are held 24/7, with people taking turns supplying food, water and bathroom breaks. Thousands upon thousands of young people gathering each night to peacefully protest by singing, reading poems and lighting candles.

Photo credits:  To slideshow photo by Angela Fallantine. Photos of La Manif Pour Tous rallies from their facebook page.

© 2007-2012 Chocolate on my Cranium, LLC all rights reserved

World Congress of Families Day 02 Part I

Another great day full of information from Angela. So much to digest! I really appreciate how these speakers and presenters are from all over the world. Please share about this great congress by sharing these posts on twitter, facebook, and linking to your blogs. The more we spread the word about traditional families the better!

Report on World Congress of Families – Day 2 (Part 1 of 2)
Plenary Opening Session – Main Auditorium *Packed to capacity, standing room only = exciting!

Patrick Parkinson (Family Law Attorney, Consultant to Family Law – London). Speech: The Economic Rationale for Governments to Invest in Family Stability

• There is a rapid increase in the fragility of families around the Western world. There is a tipping point in which it is likely too late to reverse the trends. Unfortunately, social calamity is the result of the collapse of the natural family. There are intergenerational impacts such as poverty, diminished educational opportunities, downward mobility in socioeconomic status. This is all manifested in a rise in parental stress, neglect, abuse, poor mental health and so forth. Ultimately, the public costs for fragile families is very high.
• There is a growing crises in mental health with adolescents and the trend is correlated with divorce in all cases (the data proves it). There is an alarming crisis in particular with teenage girls of divorced, broken homes. Of all the girls ages 12-14, ¼ have some serious mental disorder and attempt self harm and binge drink, at a rate of SIX times greater than boys. There is a 90% increase in the rate of self harm for girls aged 10+. Reasons: Fragile families have serious impacts on children’s wellbeing.
• Implications: How much family instability can we cope with before we finally get serious about reversing the trend? It is an inconvenient truth, but it needs to be addressed.

Peter Meurs, Area Seventy, distinguished businessman. Speech: The Impact of Work on the Family

• The LDS Church is a tremendous part of the World Congress of Families and always has been.
• There is a shift and change of even the most basic values in society. This was illustrated in a personal experience he had. He shared story of a business dinner he was at with a group of colleagues. His phone rang and it was his daughter’s boyfriend calling to ask for her hand in marriage. Elder Meurs returned to his business dinner and shared the conversation he had just had with his colleagues. These men (who considered themselves family men) were utterly SHOCKED at 1) the young man asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage; 2) his daughter wasn’t already living with her boyfriend; and 3) they were actually going to get married. This story illustrates the change in our culture.
• Elder Meurs shared the stories of his company working to employ the Aboriginee people of Australia and showcased the incredible changes that hard work and family values made in their lives. Pulling people out of poverty and getting them to work rather than be on welfare is key.

Dr. Miriam Grossman, Psychiatrist, author and UN Status on Commission of Women. Speech: A Brief History of Sex Education: Where Today’s Madness Comes From.

• Sex education used to be about the facts of sex and something more special and bigger: the relationship between husbands and wives. Things have changed. Now we have sexuality education which involves complex issues such as gender identity, sex, abortion, non-discrimination policies, gay sex and children are taught that they are sexual as soon as they are born. The terms “husband and wife” are never used. They also teach that gender is a complicated matter and to them, a boy might turn into a man or he might turn into a woman, or something else.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvlCx3w_tss Alarming video clip from Planned Parenthood
• Childhood innocence? Forget about it with the current and trending sex education lessons. They are providing websites and resources for children which include astonishing, bizarre and disgusting behaviors. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you what recommended websites are teaching children.
• So where did all of this stem from? Info found in the book “The History of Sex Education” by Dr. Grossman. To sum it up, modern sex ed began in the 1960’s. A deeply disturbed psychologist named Alfred Kinsey believed that anything goes when it came to sexuality. His biography documents his horrible beliefs, including “traditional morality and religion is destructive and damaging.” His research wanted to prove the way he lived was normal. SECUS is the group behind sex ed and they aggressively promote teaching guidelines around the world based on Dr. Kinsey.
• Another disturbing sex ed promoter was Mary Caldrone. She went on a crusade to change morals and society and felt there were too many rules in sex ed. She wanted to teach that children are sexual beings. The book she authored, “Talking with Your Child About Sex” (1982) was unbelievable. Modern sex ed is all about breaking boundaries.
• In 1955, John Money, PhD started the false premise that being male and female is just a feeling and we are born “gender-neutral” and society conditions us to determine if we are male or female. He was a pedophile who believed incest was normal love.
• These people used fraudulent data and their personal ideas to succeed in transforming Western society’s sex education. It quite literally came from disturbed individuals who wanted sex ed’s end goal to have children open to any and all sexual experimentation. Change society one child at a time.
• How does this continue to remain unchecked? SIECUS, Planned Parenthood, etc. are incredibly strong voices. Where is the accountability?
• Sometimes it appears as though this situation is like David and Goliath. However, the secret weapon is biology and scientific truth, which refute all of the aforementioned people’s false premises. The battle is uphill, but think of David and Goliath: Who won that battle?

Faith, Family and Civilization: Page Patterson USA and Rabbi Shimone Cowen, Australia

• We’ve heard about much of the darkness that has invaded our civilization. But it is very important to not focus on the evils but it is important that we bring to the floor the light that can transform society. We reflect on the sources of our values. Let’s tap into that light and make it more conscious to all of humanity.
• There are eternal values found within the human spirit. We need to begin again and discuss the human spirit. This is part of the Charter for the World Congress of Families. There is a moral template for society here.
• The values of the Abrahamic religions are fundamental principles for governing the relationship between God and man. If we can reveal the human spirit, these values will return and resonate with people.
• Current moral libertarianism is only one voice. Over and over again, they say to leave religion aside. They deny that we have a spirit. They only go for reason. The key is to uncover the human spirit and soul, and there we will find that morality isn’t an imposition but a realization.
• There is freedom in being good, freedom in choosing the right. Human beings were created for a divine mission and this is perpetuated in future generations with the union of a man and a woman with God.

© 2007-2012 Chocolate on my Cranium, LLC all rights reserved