A Psalm Against the Merchants of Children by Jeff Callaway
A Psalm Against the Merchants of Children
A Reckoning Before the Throne of the Living God
by Jeff Callaway
Texas Outlaw Poet
I. THE NUMBERS FIRST
Because the numbers are the confession and the confession must be spoken aloud before this court, before this altar, before the God who counts every hair, every tear, every child —
One hundred thirteen thousand, five hundred.
Say it. Say it the way a father says the name of a son he cannot find.
One hundred thirteen thousand, five hundred reports in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-five of children being sold. Not lost. Not missing. Sold. Marketed. Auctioned. Streamed live on platforms that were built in Silicon Valley by men who would weep at a dog dying on the side of the road.
One in seven. One in seven children reported missing is likely being used as a product. A transaction. A session. An invoice paid.
A human child. Made in the image and likeness of God Almighty. Bought and sold like a sack of grain rotting in the Texas August heat.
This is not metaphor. This is a report. This is a CyberTipline number. This is a database entry. This is a child.
II. I KNOW THIS GOD YOU SERVE
I know him. He has walked before. He walked in bronze in the valley of the son of Hinnom outside the gates of Jerusalem where decent people lived and worshipped and knew nothing or said nothing which is the same thing.
His arms were outstretched and his belly was a furnace and the drums beat so that the mothers would not have to hear the screaming and could tell themselves this was devotion.
His name was Moloch. It has always been Moloch. Only the altar has changed. Only the instruments. Only the currency.
Moses stood at the foot of Sinai and God said it plain, said it like a man saying a thing that should not have to be said — Thou shalt not give any of thy seed to pass through to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God. (Leviticus 18:21)
They did it anyway. Solomon did it. Ahaz did it. Manasseh did it. Each generation thought they had given it a new name and that new names change the nature of a thing.
They do not.
The valley of Hinnom became Gehenna. Gehenna became the word for Hell itself. God named the place of child sacrifice Hell so that no man who came after would wonder what He thought of it.
And here we are in the valley again. The drums are laptops now. The fire is a broadband connection. The priests wear hoodies and take cryptocurrency. But the children are still burning. And the respectable people still live close enough to hear it and still beat their drums.
III. WHO BUILT THIS ALTAR
I am not interested in assigning this to one party because both parties built this altar brick by funded brick.
The Republican who preached family values from a podium and cashed a check from a platform he knew was selling children in its back rooms.
The Democrat who stood for the marginalized and voted against every bill that might have stopped the digital marketplace because his donors write code and code is neutral and neutral is a word cowards use when they mean profitable.
The senator who looks at the ICAC taskforce numbers, at the Internet Crimes Against Children investigators losing their federal grants, losing their training conferences, losing their tools while the predators upgrade their AI — and shrugs. Actually shrugs.
The lobbyist. The tech lawyer. The platform counsel who stood before Congress and said we are committed to child safety while ninety-three percent of the reports came from his client's servers.
The Catechism speaks clearly to these men. CCC 2414 does not stutter. It calls the enslavement of human beings bought and sold like merchandise a sin against the dignity of persons and their fundamental rights. Not a policy disagreement. Not a regulatory challenge. A sin.
Vatican II called it plainly in Gaudium et Spes: the selling of women and children is an infamy. A supreme dishonour to the Creator. Not a bad look. Not a PR problem. A supreme dishonour to the God who made the children you are selling.
You will stand before that God. Every one of you will stand before that God.
IV. THE BUYER
I have to name the buyer because the seller exists only as long as the buyer exists and the buyer is not some distant monster in a foreign land —
The buyer is here. In your ZIP code. In your subdivision. In your church pew, three rows back, singing about the blood of Christ on a Sunday morning.
The buyer is on the same platforms his daughter uses. He knows the language. He knows the code. He knows where to go and he goes there because we built him a world where desire was never required to answer to anything.
No confession. No consequence. No community that speaks the name of his sin out loud in public without looking away first.
Pope Francis said it clearly: human trafficking cannot be defeated without eliminating the consumerism that feeds it. That means you, buyer. That means the demand. That means the appetite that you have fed and fed until the appetite became the god and the god required children.
There is a word for what you are. It is in Leviticus 20. God said the man who gives his children to Moloch shall surely be put to death. I am not calling for your execution. I am calling for your repentance and I am telling you that the God whose wrath I fear has not changed His mind about you because your credit card processes seamlessly.
V. TO THE MACHINES
I turn now to address the machines and the men who love them more than children.
The generative artificial intelligence reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children went from six thousand, eight hundred and thirty-five in the first half of 2024 to four hundred and forty thousand, four hundred and nineteen in the first half of 2025.
Let that number just sit here a moment in the silence.
440,419.
Not pornography downloaded. Not archived images trafficked. Images generated. Made from nothing. Made with code. Made by a machine that a man taught to make a child's suffering from scratch, on demand, without even a crime scene, without even a victim to trace.
Or so they thought.
But the Catechism does not make exceptions for novelty. The Church does not carve out exemptions for innovation. And the God of Abraham and Isaac did not write a footnote that says: unless it is synthetic.
The image of a child being destroyed is the image of God being destroyed. There is no other theology here. The Second Vatican Council called it. It is a supreme dishonour to the Creator.
The Creator is not impressed by your server farm. The Creator is not awed by your parameters. The Creator has a name for what you have trained your model to produce and it is not content moderation failure. It is abomination.
VI. LAMENT: A VOICE FROM THE VALLEY
Here the psalm stops.
Here the outlaw poet who has been swinging this hammer for a thousand words sets the hammer down and sits in the dirt of this Texas field and weeps.
Because somewhere right now there is a child who was reported to NCMEC by a platform that noticed what the platform sold and filed the report and went back to selling it.
A child who was trafficked from a child welfare placement. A child of the State. A child already failed by the first institution and then the second and then the third and then sold to the man who understood that failed children make the quietest victims.
I want to speak to that child directly. I know you are not reading this. I know you may not be alive to read this. I know the world failed you in ways that no psalm can reach.
But I am writing this in the presence of God and God does not lose addresses. God does not misplace children.
The Lord Jesus Christ set a child in the midst of them and said the Kingdom belongs to these. Not the theologians. Not the legislators. Not the poets. These. You.
Their angels in heaven always see the face of the Father. (Matthew 18:10)
Your angel has not stopped looking at that face. Not once. Not for a second. Not in the worst moment in the worst room in the worst hour of your life.
You were never abandoned by Heaven. You were abandoned by men. The difference is eternal.
VII. THE IMPRECATION
Now I return to the hammer.
I am a Catholic man. I believe in mercy. I believe in the infinite capacity of God to forgive. I believe a murderer can die a saint. I believe a trafficker can confess and be absolved.
I believe all of that.
And I am calling down the wrath of God on every man who bought a child and has not repented. On every CEO who optimized engagement and chose not to see. On every politician who took a donor's check and looked away from the fire in Hinnom valley. On every algorithm trained on the hunger of predators. On every law enforcement conference cancelled while children burned.
I am calling this what the prophet called it. I am standing in this valley and I am saying: the ground here is cursed because of the blood of the innocent and the men who stand in the warm rooms above this valley deciding it is not their problem will answer.
Not to me. To the God who filled this valley with their dead and renamed it Hell.
But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea. (Matthew 18:6)
This is not rhetoric. This is not Texas anger dressed up in church clothes. This is the Son of God speaking plainly in the language of consequence to men who think consequence has a terms-of-service agreement they have already read and clicked past.
There is no clicking past this.
VIII. PRAYER OF A BROKEN MAN WHO WILL NOT STOP
Lord God of Hosts, God of David who killed the giant, God of the prophets who stood in the valley alone, God who wept at the tomb, God who turned over the money tables in the Temple, God who is not mocked, God who is not impressed by committee hearings or task force reports filed and forgotten —
I come to you dirty. I come to you without a suit. I come to you from a flat Texas county where I have watched the working poor scraped out and used up my whole life and I know what it looks like when a culture decides that certain people are simply available.
I am asking you to move. I am asking you to do what You did to Josiah — plant a fire in the chest of someone with power who is willing to spend that power for the children rather than for their own name.
I am asking you to expose every dark room. Every server. Every hotel corridor that your missing children have been photographed in by the men who trafficked them.
I am asking you to bring the full weight of eternal justice down on every man who thought that wealth or platform or office was a sufficient wall between him and this accounting.
I am asking you to reach into the valley of Hinnom which in this age looks like a router and a dark browser and a credit card that never shows the real transaction —
and drag it into the light where every man has to look at it.
IX. THIS IS MY VOW
I will not be quiet. I will not be polite. I will not write a tasteful poem about the complexity of digital governance when children are being sold on the same platforms my nieces use to show each other songs.
I will not pretend that my politics can remain tidy in the presence of this.
113,500.
One in seven.
These are not statistics. These are children made in the image of the God I love. And the God I love said plainly: despise not one of these little ones.
I will not despise them by my silence.
I am one man. With a pen. With a website. With a God who has moved armies with less.
X. THE ASH
The psalm ends here not in triumph not in resolution but in ash because this is not the kind of wrong that gets a tidy ending.
Not yet.
The valley still smokes. The drums are still beating. The numbers are still climbing.
But I have spoken the name of this god. And named gods lose power. And the God of Israel has a history with valleys of the dead and the men who made them.
He always comes back to the valley.
He is coming back to this one.
~Jeff Callaway
Texas Outlaw Poet
© 2026 Texas Outlaw Press
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