Three dozen religious leaders took out a full-page ad in Tuesday's edition of The New York Times, publicly calling on Village Voice Media to stop accepting adult ads on its classified advertising website, backpage.com, because of numerous cases of child sex-trafficking that have been linked to the site by police.

The demand to shut down backpage.com's adult advertising section comes two months after 51 state attorneys general, including Washington state's Rob McKenna, issued a similar demand and asked Village Voice executives to back up their assertion that they go to great lengths to prevent the sexual exploitation of minors on the site.

The newly formed multifaith coalition is made up of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Humanists and other moral and religious leaders. The group was convened by Groundswell, a social-action initiative that was started by the Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. So far, none of the coalition members is from the Pacific Northwest.

"It is a basic fact of the moral universe that girls and boys should not be sold for sex," begins the "open letter" to Village Voice Media CEO Jim Larkin and the company's board of directors published in The New York Times.

Backpage.com is owned by Village Voice Media, publisher of Seattle Weekly and 12 other weekly newspapers across the country.

In a response posted at http://blog.backpage.com, the company responded to the clergy's ad by saying: "The religious coalition demanded that we close down our legal, adult classifieds. Neither government officials nor God's advocates can dictate such arbitrary control of business or speech."

According to its online response, Village Voice officials agreed to a meeting in New York City with coalition members and offered to pay airfare costs so that all the religious leaders could attend, instead of meeting with four representatives appointed by the coalition.

Isaac Luria, executive director of Groundswell, said coordinating a full coalition meeting — which was first requested 75 days ago — was next to impossible. "Under no circumstances was the clergy coalition going to accept funding for air travel from a site that makes money off these ads," he said.

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, along with seven other Washington mayors, has urged backpage.com to take additional steps to prevent the use of the site to prostitute underage girls.