Contact: Don Feder, 508-405-1337, don@worldcongress.org; The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society, 815-964-5819, media@worldcongress.org
ROCKFORD, Ill., May 9, 2013 /Christian Newswire/ -- A report by the United Nations Development's Program's Global Commission on HIV and the Law, funded in part by a grant from George Soros' Open Society Foundation, has a peculiar prescription for combating AIDS. It calls on governments around the world to legalize prostitution, including child prostitution, and drug use.
World Congress of Families Managing Director Larry Jacobs observed: "This is insane. The 'reasoning,' if it can even be called that, is that by criminalizing prostitution, governments promote the spread of AIDS. The report actually claims that women make a rational choice to sell their bodies, based on economic considerations, and should not be discouraged from doing so. It also claims that age-of-consent laws violate the right of children to be similarly degraded and abused."
Dr. Janet Shaw Crouse, of Concerned Women for America's Beverly LaHaye Institute (and a member of the World Congress of Families Management Committee), noted that, should the prescription of the UN report be followed: "We can fully expect increased HIV and sex trafficking, more suffering and deaths, and more underground criminal activity as has been the case everywhere that prostitution has been legalized. Sadly, facts get buried under leftist ideology. The tired arguments about 'sex work' ending exploitation and condoms or clean needles providing 'harm reduction' have been refuted over and over again, yet the left continues to fund such efforts even as victims continue to be exploited and human misery continues to mount." In 2010, Crouse debated legalizing prostitution at the Oxford Union.
Justin Murff, Director of Set Free: Now!, a World Congress of Families Partner, added: "We're concerned that the report's call for more sexual autonomy of youth would give rise to an increase of child sex trafficking and forced prostitution as more and more young people, including young children, will be considered easy targets by pedophiles who will no longer have to fear prosecution. Already we are seeing the age of consent lowered, in some countries to as young as 12, all in the name of children's 'rights' to physical autonomy."
In conclusion, Jacobs declared: "The United Nations, which started as a firm proponent of family values with its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- which pronounces the family 'the natural and fundamental group unit of society' and, as such, 'entitled to protection by society and the State' -- has become one of the principle adversaries of the natural family. On the whole, whenever an agency of the United Nations takes a position regarding the family and sex you can be sure common sense and morality contradict it."
Dr. Crouse is a plenary speaker at World Congress of Families VII -- Sydney, May 15-18 -- and the recipient of the WCF Woman of the Year Award. Murff will speak at a concurrent session on "Sexual Slavery and the Exploitation of Children."
World Congress of Families is the largest international gathering of pro-family leaders, activists, scholars, religious figures, professionals and parliamentarians, cutting across religious and national boundaries. Past Congresses have been held in Prague (1997), Geneva (1999), Mexico City (2004), Warsaw (2007), Amsterdam (2009) and Madrid (2012). World Congress of Families VIII is tentatively scheduled from September 10-12 in Moscow, the Kremlin, in 2014.
Specifically, the World Congress of Families seeks to affirm and defend the natural family by shifting the terms of certain key public debates worldwide:
- From "The family as an obstacle to development" to the "family as the source of social renewal and progress";
- From "overpopulation" to "underpopulation" as the demographic problem facing the 21st century;
- From "the small family and voluntary childlessness as good" to "the celebration of the large family as a special social gift";
- And from religious orthodoxy as a "threat to progress" to "religious orthodoxy as the source of humane values and cultural progress."
Click here for an up-to-date program of WCF Sydney 2013: wcfsydney2013.org.au/program.
Click here for a list of highlighted speakers: wcfsydney2013.org.au/speakers/keynote-speakers.
Click here for more information: wcfsydney2013.org.au.
Click here to register: wcfsydney2013.org.au/registration.
For more information on World Congress of Families, please visit www.worldcongress.org. To schedule an interview with Larry Jacobs, contact Don Feder at 1-508-405-1337.
The Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society (www.profam.org) is located in Rockford, Illinois and is an independent, non-profit research and education center that provides sound scholarship and effective strategies to affirm and defend the natural family, thus renewing a stable and free society. The Howard Center is the publisher of the journal, "The Family In America" and is also the organizer of the World Congress of Families (WCF) project which is an international network of pro-family organizations, scholars, leaders and inter-faith people of goodwill from more than 80 countries that seek to restore the natural family as the fundamental social unit and the 'seedbed' of civil society (as found in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948). The WCF was founded in 1997 by Dr. Allan Carlson, President of The Howard Center. To date, there have been five World Congresses of Families -- Prague (1997), Geneva (1999), Mexico City (2004), Warsaw, Poland (2007) and Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2009). World Congress of Families VI was held in Madrid, Spain in May 25-27, 2012. World Congress of Families VII will be held in Sydney, Australia, May 15-18, 2013, www.wcfsydney2013.org.au.
