Sure, Thomas Jefferson was fervent about a “wall of separation between church and state”—but little did he anticipate the “shadows of the Internet” that would later haunt his beloved Virginia. Last week, state Attorney General Bill Mims announced a partnership with the faith-based community “to protect Virginia’s children.”
“There are shadows on the Internet,” said Reverend Doug Smith, executive director of the Virginia Interfaith Center, at a December 15 press conference in Richmond. “The Web brings a lot of sunlight, a lot of great things, but there are shadows out there.”
To combat such specters, Smith’s organization will distribute to congregations across the state 1,000 booklet-and-DVD kits, designed to educate parents on Internet safety. “Every second, 372 persons are typing in adult search terms,” Smith said. “Every second. Three hundred and seventy two persons.”
Virginia became the first state to mandate Internet safety courses in schools, and the attorney general’s office helped push privacy changes on secular sites like MySpace and Facebook. Now, it wants to reach out to congregations. The A.G. office is providing $12,000 to buy the kits from Enough is Enough, a Reston-based nonprofit dedicated to making “the Internet safer for children and families.” That money comes from the Youth Internet Safety fund, comprised of private donations. The U.S. Department of Justice kicked in a matching grant.
In her former life, Enough is Enough president Donna Rice Hughes was known as the gal who brought down Gary Hart—his 1988 presidential aspirations were shot when the National Enquirer published a photo of her draped across the senator’s lap. Now Hughes teaches adults about the horrors that apparently are flashing constantly before their children’s eyes.
“Despite the efforts made by this [A.G.] office and other offices across the country, a perfect storm continues to gain strength across the Internet from which no child is immune,” said Hughes.
This isn’t the first time that the Virginia attorney general has worked with Hughes’ organization. Hughes served on the Youth Internet Safety Task Force in 2006 at the behest of then-A.G. and incoming governor, Bob McDonnell. In 2008, Enough is Enough piloted the Internet safety kits in Virginia, distributing 2,600 to the Virginia PTA. It’s planning a national launch in January.
Not so long ago, before the ubiquity of Internet access, teenage porn consisted of a magazine under the mattress or a night of eyestrain from watching the grainy static of a scrambled Skinemax. Hughes paints a grim picture of the new reality, with corruption lurking around every corner, or at least on every imaginable screen: the Xbox, Playstation, iPod, mobile phone and, of course, the computer. Apparently anything with an Internet connection can be easily transformed into a pornography box or a predator’s den, and to hear Hughes, that’s exactly what kids these days are likely to do, thanks to the relentless attack of the porn industry and Internet predators.
In the DVD, horror stories abound. “There’s nothing that a parent can do once a child gets online and gets into a chat room or website or instant message that can prevent being approached by a predator,” warns John Doe, an anonymous former school teacher and “convicted sex offender.” “We spend a lot of time educating [parents] as to the dangers, how the pornographers operate, how the predators operate and everything else,” says Hughes, “so that then, once we get to the rules and tools, they understand exactly why they need to implement each one of those.”
Parents might not be able to sleep, but Jefferson, at least, need not roll over in his Monticello grave: The kits contain no religious content.
“It’s something that can go,” said Mims, “whether it’s in a synagogue, a mosque, or a church, or a school, or a home or anywhere in Virginia and will resonate with a broad and diverse group of individuals throughout the state.”
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