“There is so much hope for South Africa,” said Pastor Errol Naidoo from the Family Policy Institute (FPI) in Cape Town during a recent visit to Louis Trichardt.

There is much that citizens can do to exert influence to avert proposed laws that are harmful to the family. The fact that the drive to legalise prostitution before the FIFA World Cup was unsuccessful is proof of the influence of individuals and groups.

The office of the FPI is situated right next to parliament and Naidoo has contact with the President and Members of Parliament and at times appears on national television .

The FPI played a strategic role to inform government about the dangers of legalised prostitution. The ESPN Sports network from the USA interviewed Naidoo when they were in South Africa in May to investigate the link between the soccer world cup and global sex trafficking.

“Research has shown that organised crime takes over when prostitution is legalised or decriminalised. Trafficking of women and children increases. Christians contacted FPI by e-mail and asked how to make a submission. A tsunami of submissions flooded them, so that it was not possible to work through all of them before the World Cup. The huge push to legalise prostitution before the soccer was defeated,” Naidoo said on August 21 at the Agapé Christian Centre.

FPI is now working with one of the deputy-ministers to get a law passed to protect children from pornography. In July, the FPI hosted a “Symposium on the Effects of Children’s Exposure to Pornography and the Impact to Society” in Newlands, which was well attended by various government departments and the SAPS. The Attorney General Commission’s statement is quoted: “For children to be taught by these materials that sex is public, that sex is commercial and that sex can be divorced from any degree of affection, love, commitment or marriage is the wrong message at the wrong time.”

“When the legalisation of abortion and same sex marriages was pushed through, the church was in disarray and only realised it when it was too late,” Naidoo said.

Naidoo says that under the Zuma administration there is a window of opportunity for positive influence from the church and there is a shift in attitude towards family values. The message from president Zuma is that the church is not speaking loud enough.

The website address of the Family Policy Institute is www.familypolicyinstitute.com