The Super Bowl has evolved from a major sporting event into an advertising extravaganza that happens to include a football game. It morphs still, a day now full of Causes and Messages. At what point do so many voices vying for attention cancel each other out? When does it become like a seismic Seahawk crowd drowning out a quarterback’s call?
One organization grabbing the Super Bowl pulpit this year is the unfortunately named XXX Church and its unfortunately named “National Porn Sunday.” Church founder Craig Gross says more than 300 churches across the country are participating to take a stand against pornography and sexual addiction.
The XXX Church’s Super Bowl message: Porn is a problem that needs to be addressed but churches usually ignore the issue.
“It is estimated that 95 million will watch the Super Bowl,” Gross says, “but research shows that 40 million Americans visit porn sites every day. The porn revenue is larger than the revenues of the professional football, baseball or basketball leagues in this country.”
The insinuation that 40 million Americans “have a problem” with porn likely limits the reach of that particular message, just as the moniker “National Porn Sunday” might not send the message Gross intends.
On the other side of a coin is the group Traffik911, and its on-point attempts to highlight and stop the prostituting of children and teenagers that happens in whatever city hosts the Super Bowl.
“This is a very large issue. We want people to know what human trafficking looks like,” Thomas Lawrence, an assistant Dallas police chief, told the Associated Press. Last year’s Super Bowl in Miami drew as many as 10,000 prostitutes, including children and human trafficking victims, police said. A Hawaii man was sentenced to more than 20 years in federal prison for taking a teenager with him to Miami and forcing her to work as a prostitute.
In 2008, Phoenix police broke up a child prostitution ring involving several teenagers before the game. The following year in Tampa, two men were arrested for advertising the services of a 14-year-old as a “Super Bowl special.” They were sentenced to federal prison. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimates that at least 100,000 children in the U.S. are victims of prostitution each year.
No surprise that the Super Bowl brings out the pimps and prostitutes, just like everyone trying to make a buck. That pimps purposely bring children to the host city, however, might take a lot of us by surprise, and horror. So it seems one message trumps all others.
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