Why I Boycotted Amazon This Week

I jumped on a bandwagon Wednesday. I was one of the thousands who tweeted out against Amazon.com's decision to carry on its Kindle store the e-book The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-lover's Code of Conduct.

According to Philip R. Greaves II, his self-published book would "make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certain rules for these adults to follow." Greaves hoped "to achieve this by appealing to the better nature of pedosexuals, with hope that their doing so will result in less hatred and perhaps liter [sic] sentences should they ever be caught."

Ah, lovely. This book, for sale at the same place I regularly order Christmas gifts for my own children. The ones this guy would probably want to molest, albeit "safely," thereby receiving a "liter" sentence for doing so were he caught. I don't think so.

So, even though I love Amazon, even though my own book is sold there, and even though I'm grateful Amazon gives us writers a chance to be read and critiqued and ranked, I joined the masses in an "#amazonfail" Twitter campaign. While others called for boycotts and aggressively shamed the company, I simply tweeted, "Glad to have ordered the new Wimpy Kid from @Borders. @Amazon, pull that pedophilia book! #amazonfail"

But even though my words didn't scathe or scare, I wrestled with what I had written. With what I was asking Amazon to do. As a lifelong lover of books and language and ideas, I seemed to be joining the ranks of the old-school book burners, of those who took offense to a word or an image or an idea and moved to ban it from public discourse. But now, instead of burning a barrel of books on the library steps (I'm imagining that scene from Footloose), we were burning virtual books on Twitter.

A friend's Facebook comment made me wonder further about what I had tweeted: "There is a freedom of speech issue here. Even when you don't agree with something is it worth having it banned/removed?"

His comment came on Veteran's Day. No small irony, since it's a humbling day when I pray for the men and women who risk and have risked their lives so that I can write and say whatever I want (except "Fire!" in theaters, of course), so that I can voice my opinions without fear of being jailed, so that I can write books or articles or stories no matter how offensive they may be to others.

But as I read my friend's question of, "Is it worth it?" my heart and head said, "Yes." With this book—an instruction manual for child molesters—yes.

Because this wasn't simply a matter of free speech. And even if it were about free speech, as a Christian I have higher rights to defend, including this one: to "speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed" (Prov. 31:8, NLT).

I first underlined that verse as a high school student. Next to it, I wrote, "A good verse for life." And so it's been.

So, while I can stand by and even encourage conversations and books and movies about things I disagree with, I cannot stand idly by those things that seek to crush the defenseless, including a how-to manual for pedophiles.

This issue isn't about censorship (as my friend and Amazon initially claimed)—Greaves can blog and speak about this all he wants. The issue is about a consumer community telling a company that we will not stand by while they profit off child abuse. This is about consumers using their own free speech and the free market to demand more, higher standards from the stores at which they shop.

Amazingly, within a day, because of pressure from Twitter and the Facebook groups that sprung up, calling for boycotts, Amazon took down the book. Let's hope it stays this way.

Of course, my hypocrisy in all this is that I do business at plenty of companies that profit off child abuse. I'm likely wearing something right now that was made by a child no older than my oldest (age 8). This Christmas, my kids will probably open at least one gift made in part by someone else's child slave.

That's a problem. Suddenly that "good verse for life" I underlined so long ago gets complicated.

Yet, today Christians' opportunity to speak up has never been stronger. It took one day for Amazon to change course because of people typing on Twitter and Facebook.

While our government would have taken years and millions of dollars and thousands of unread pages to pass laws to forbid the sale of how-to-molest-children handbooks, it took a lot of caring people just 140 characters and a day. Maybe 15 cents worth of time.

Imagine what those same people—plus a whole Twitterverse of Christians—could do to speak up for the defenseless, to rescue all those others being crushed by injustice. If we took everybody else to task. If we tweeted up for those who cannot tweet for themselves. That's about the best use of free speech I can think of.

Caryn Rivadeneira is a writer, speaker, and mother of three, and the author of Mama's Got a Fake I.D. as well as a book forthcoming from Tyndale House. She has written for Her.meneutics on Halloween, burqas, fathers, Mother's Day, spanking, happiness, and pregnant Olympians.