tuquoque

Until then

What do you do if a known, convicted paedophile moves into your area? How do you protect your family, your kids, when someone who has done gaol time is living down the street? The news has bubbled over with stories of late about Dennis Ferguson, who, having served over fourteen years for child sex offences, having been driven out of several towns in Queensland who did not want him living among them, has now landed in public housing in Ryde.

I’ve been asking people what they think should happen next – it’s the ideal issue to see how strongly people feel the need for justice – and the feedback is more or less variations on the theme of, ‘Put him somewhere else, somewhere where he can have no contact with children ever’, with the exception of a few people who say things like, ‘You’re assuming he has the right to live.’ But the obvious difficulty is, if you take the former position, where is an appropriate place for him to be housed? Will he be relocated from Ryde to another suburb where residents will complain? And will he then be relocated again, and again? At what point does depriving a person of adequate housing – even a person who is a paedophile – become a human rights problem?

Pragmatically, can the State effectively protect children by capriciously relocating Ferguson? Economically, can the State sustain the cost of compensating Ferguson (which he is entitled to, should they relocate him), or the cost of imprisoning him again? Judicially, is the public awareness of Ferguson’s whereabouts eventually going to lead to the public taking the law into its own hands?

In the interests of full disclosure (and, perhaps, to avoid lots of angry comments from people who think I am speaking in defence of Ferguson), I used to work in child protection and I have seen, first-hand, the physical, sexual, and psychological damage that paedophiles do to their victims. It’s vile. It’s horrible. The wounds take decades to heal. Perhaps they never fully heal. I know that the conviction rates for child sex offences in the criminal court are poor. I know the prognosis for rehabilitating paedophilic offenders is not favourable because of the extraordinarily high rate of recidivism. And, having scanned some of the news stories on Ferguson, it appears that the media have brought up a lot of circumstantial evidence suggesting that he continues to engage in employment and activities that bring him into contact with children. I feel the force of the community outrage. It is right to be outraged that a man could do such terrible things to another human being, especially children.

As someone who will be a father in less than six weeks, I think I would agree that the need to protect children outweighs the rights of the offender. But as a Christian, I also feel that I am in the business of extending grace and forgiveness to sinners – and, as Jesus knows most powerfully, grace and forgiveness are never cheap. God gives grace freely, yet He is also a God who is just and whose soul hates the wicked. He has chosen His Son, Jesus, the Firstborn from among the dead, to bring judgement down on the heads of the sinner at the end of time. That is when Ferguson will receive what he deserves for his defiance of God. But until then…what?

A sound, a thin silence

The time has come, it seems.

Lorien and I begin our grand six-week overseas jaunt tomorrow. We will get up at about 4:00am tomorrow morning and will be chauffered to the airport (by the megasuperfantastic Frank and the lovely Rach). From there, we catch several planes, spend lots of time waiting around in airport transit lounges, and land in South Asia sometime at about 10:00pm their time. It’s a holiday with a missional edge – part of the purpose of the trip is for Lorien to show me all the places where she grew up, part of it is to have some much-needed downtime, and part of it is to see what God’s got going on over there, and how we might be a part of that in a long-term sense.

We’re hoping to have a pretty smashing time! It hasn’t been that long since we last visited that parted of the world, but I’ve been craving it for a while, and it will be awesome to visit as marrieds (rather than part of a team), so we can use our time without having to worry about a team of others.

Some random facts so far:

• Airlines do not appear to issue paper tickets anymore. We went down to our friendly travel agent and all she gave us was a printed itinerary with an e-ticket number on it. Allegedly, this is all we need to travel, as the airlines have some secret database or website where our details are stored. I feel slightly unprepared, nay, naked without paper tickets.
• Visas for all three countries we are visiting cost ~$650. Ouch.
• We thought we would be leaving behind the summer heat in Sydney and enjoying the cooler climes of the northern hemisphere. Turns out we were wrong: tomorrow will be about 33°C in Sydney, and 28°C in our first destination.
• Our primary mode of transport will be train or autorickshaw.
• We have heard good things about Changi Airport in Singapore, including rumours of a free cinema and free X-Box (I think, “Awesome!”; wife thinks, “Er…no.”). In God’s provision, we are going there instead of Suvarnabhumi in Thailand.
• This will be the longest time I have been away from my home, family, and country. It will also be the first Christmas away from both of my families. I’m not sure if that bothers me, though.

Anticipating: airports!, seeing new places, meeting new people, cheap and awesome food, spicy tea in clay cups, bazaars, flexing my flabby Bangla muscles, catching trains, wearing salwar qamiz and lungi, riding in the back of rickshaws, time to reflect and write, taking lots of photos and video, getting my head shaved with a razor blade, catching up with old friends and making new ones, grand architecture and beautiful ruins, fellowship, time with Lorien.

Anxious about: many long plane flights and weird time-zone crossings, heat and humidity, sharing my personal space, missing transport connections, getting lost, epic language fail(s), epic culture fail(s), bags getting lost/stolen, various tummy bugs, strikes, explosions, exhaustion, not resting.

Talk to you in six weeks.

And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire a sound, a thin silence. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
(1 Kings 19:11-13, ESV)

A vile business

My church has recently had the opportunity to object to a development application released by the local council, relating to a proposal to develop a brothel in a nearby area.

Writing my own objection letter has forced me to think through the grounds on which I establish the inappropriateness of a brothel. Clearly, as a Christian, I (and, I should hope, those from my church who are also planning on objecting) have chosen to let the council know that I disapprove on the grounds that a brothel encourages and sanctions sexual immorality, in a way demonstrative of the way God has given man over to lustful sin and the depravity which has resulted. As Christians in a sinful society, we are called upon to be salt and light (Matthew 5:13-14) and be distinctive, and I think it is reasonable to say that one way of doing so is objecting to the development application for this brothel.

However, I find myself wondering if the council will dismiss the Christian argument out of hand. Our objection is largely based on a worldview which presupposes a number of things – the fallen state of man, the sinfulness of having sex with a woman (or man) who is not your spouse, the vile nature of building an institution which is permissive of such relations, the sovereignty of God and His anger at our sin. I’m convinced that this, surely, underlies any Christian objection to brothels (and prostitution in general); I am not entirely convinced, though, the council will not demand more evidence from Christians if their objection is to be upheld.

I initially thought that you could move away from a Christian argument and adopt a more moralist perspective, which seems to more or less define those who have objected to brothels elsewhere in Sydney. These people often cite a range of reasons for their opposition to applications for brothels, including the defilement of sex (as a special and private activity, though the reasons for this vary), the degradement of women who prostitute themselves in brothels, the distasteful nature of paid sex, and so on. Moralists may also argue more ‘pragmatic’ reasons for their opposition, including the increased use of substances allegedly associated with prostitution (which, I hear, is not borne out in research – though I wonder if that would be an artifact of the population being studied), increased noise, paraphernalia being left around the area, the possibility of the exposure of children to the activities being held in the brothel, and so on.

But, the more I thought about that, the more the idea stuck in my craw. A moralist position is not based on absolutes (as the Christian position is), but each moralist is speaking from assumptions. What is their view on the nature of sex? Is their problem that prostitution violates the sanctity of a sexual union between…a man and a woman? A man and a man? A woman and a woman? On what grounds does prostitution violate this sanctity? Is it to do with cheapening the sex act? Breaking the bond of fidelity? A pairing of sex with money, and, by extension, a commodification of sex? Without the Bible’s guidance, these presuppositions present to me as being rickety and easily disputed, at least in secular fora.

Of course, I don’t advocate adopting the view of those who approve of brothels on the basis of ‘why not?’. Indeed, I have read the arguments of civil libertarians (a title I use cautiously) who reject the arguments of Christian and non-Christians alike, saying, in essence, that every man or woman has the right to seek pleasure (including sexual pleasure) in whatever fashion he or she chooses. It has even been said that, should the ‘buyer’ and the ‘seller’ in a brothel be consensual and willing parties to the ‘transaction’, then this is no different than the buyer and seller experience we have when we go to the grocery shop. The civil libertarian, depending on the extremity of their stance, would then say that any moral objections to prostitution are founded purely on the idea of what we should consider ‘evil’ as a society. It is at this point that I wonder what disgusts the Lord more – the unifying of a man with a prostitute, or the cheapening of sex and the blatant approval of sex outside God’s intended context by those in this extreme libertarian position.

The essence of my objection to a brothel must be, in some way, religious, moral, and/or ideological – brothels have been decriminalised since 1995 in New South Wales, so I cannot argue that a brothel is, in essence, a criminal establishment. The only solace for any kind of legal argument lies in the council’s restrictions on where a brothel may be built (and, as it turns out, I believe the development application violates several of those restrictions). I can only hope that God’s sovereignty means that the council will consider, in some way, God’s wrath towards all sin, including prostitution, in their deliberations.