Sunday, February 7, 2010

Adopting Third World Babies to Convert Them.

Kathryn Joyce at the Daily Beast on the evangelical strategy of adopting third world babies to convert them:

Bill Clinton, who is helping relief efforts in earthquake-torn Haiti, has stepped in to the U.S. missionaries' adoption mêlée. His diplomatic efforts may free all but one of the 10 jailed missionaries. The group's leader, Laura Silsby, will likely still be held. During a visit Friday, Clinton said he believed the Haitian government would likely want to find a way "to defuse the crisis."

As Clinton works to spring the U.S. missionaries charged with kidnapping, the case highlights a new evangelical strategy: Adopt Third World babies and convert them.

For the past week, the news from Haiti has been dominated by the story of 10 American evangelicals from Idaho who were caught at the border of the Dominican Republic attempting to take 33 Haitian children, many with living parents, out of the country without documentation. The Americans, missionaries with the recently created New Life Children’s Refuge, were arrested and charged with kidnapping and criminal conspiracy—a reprieve from the child trafficking charges they may have faced.

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