Amazingly, a movie not made for entertainment or even with family-friendly appeal, but for urgent public awareness has drawn millions to theaters. The receipts breaking the $150 million mark prove it. It makes you weep over the heinous practice of selling and marketing children to indulge the lusts of depraved adults. It’s a wicked industry profiting perpetrators, cartels and powers operating the systemic sickening scheme beneath and within our nation’s border and networked throughout the world.

To get this movie released required yeoman effort. The resistance in high places was immense, not to mention disturbing. Why the foot-dragging and road-blocks delaying its release? It’s been dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy by a leftist columnist, Noah Berlatsky, questioning anyone being so anti-child-sex peddling. However, the dogged determination of individuals like Jim Caviezel won out. It’s now widely shown, raising eyebrows, piercing hearts, and stirring action long dormant in the public sphere.

When I watched Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkis on TV recently looking clueless before well-prepared valid questioning at a Senate hearing, I feel like he’s focused more on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in government than he is to the exploitation of children at our border.

What’s even more upsetting is to hear our government functioning like a broker in this devious child-exploitative system. Tara Lee Rodas signed up voluntarily to assist with Operation Artemis, a Biden Administration plan to get the humanitarian disaster under control on the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021. As a whistle-blower, she remarked, “Whether intentional or not, it can be argued that the US Government has become the middleman in a large scale, multi-billion-dollar, child trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children,” After releasing them to sponsors, the government doesn’t know whereabouts of 85,000 minors who crossed the border. Something is suspicious somewhere. Biden’s DOJ and Attorney General Merrick Garland look like political attack dogs going after J6’ers and Trump, but puppies at play with child- traffickers taking advantage of our nation’s border policy.

Be careful about bringing the Bible into this, regarding strangers entering the land. Ripping such verses from their context is an abuse of Scripture. Such use egregiously covers up the travesty at the border and whitewashes lax immigration policy. Speciously quoting a verse from Leviticus about aliens of that context totally disregards the context of aliens in ours. The context in Scripture for alien does not match the context of systemic gang violence, child slave-trading, human trafficking and drug cartels possessing high-tech and firepower capacities so prevalent in ours. Getting control of the border is not equivalent to unwelcoming strangers.

The biblical law in Leviticus for ancient Israel to welcome strangers then was never meant for leveraging nations now to have loose, chaotic and disorderly borders overwhelmed and unsecured, susceptible to combat-like conditions provoked by dangerous militant slave-scheming gangs doing their violent dirty work on vulnerable families and children. A grossly inept and child-endangering policy in place now cannot be justified with a Bible verse torn from its context.

The extent of slavery is worse than it has ever been. The movie Sound of Freedom prompted me to write this. How can I as a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ remain mute about this despicable evil? Thankfully the movie splendidly shows undercover good guys in government going all-out to save children from the hideous clutches of sex-enslavement. “God’s children are not for sale.” With all the left’s talk of reparations for slavery in the past, how about giving them instead to the rescued children sold into sex-slavery?

The Rev. Mel McGinnis is a Frewsburg resident.