Have you no decency, sir?
<p>I know it&#8217;s from 2001 and thus putatively old news but, sadly, <a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/595894/posts">this thread from Free Republic</a> could have been spun yesterday &#8211; and it made my jaw drop open.  It says so much about what&#8217;s wrong with both the left and right wings of American politics in this century. </p>
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<p>So, the bare bones of the story: a 15-year-old-boy is dying of cancer in Australia and his last wish before he passes on is to have sex. Friends (including, it is implied, the psychologist who reported an anonymized version of the incident) arrange a date with a prostitute. Upon hearing of this, various medical ethicists, clerics, and other viewers-with-concern flew into a tizzy.</p>
<p>I have to add this: According to one psychologist, &#8220;In a child dying over a long period of time, there is often a condition we call &#8216;skin hunger,'&#8221; The terminally ill child yearns for non-clinical contact because &#8220;mostly when people touch them, it&#8217;s to do something unpleasant, something that might hurt.&#8221;</p>
<p>The first item of idiocy came at me within the story, from an unnamed ethicist obviously deep in left-feminist-moonbat land who objected to the proceedings as &#8220;degrading to women&#8221;. Um, excuse me?  If that hooker has anything even remotely like the emotional wiring of a normal human female, after that gig she&#8217;s going to feel <em>better</em> about her line of work &#8211; <em>less</em> &#8220;degraded&#8221; &#8211; for the <em>entire rest of her life</em>. In fact, the first woman I shared the story with immediately said she&#8217;d have volunteered to de-virginate the kid herself, and I&#8217;d bet long odds the professional waived her fee.</p>
<p>&#8220;Degrading to women.&#8221; As applied here this is duckspeak, pure and simple &#8211; a catchphrase intended not to express or provoke thought but to shut it down. If anything, this particular shibboleth of the left has become worse overused and more emptied of meaning in the thirteen years since.</p>
<p>But as appallingly stupid and insensitive as that was, it pales into insignificance besides what the social-conservative right-wingers got up to in the thread comments.</p>
<p>Representative line: &#8220;This is the sort of soul-less, animalistic response to impending death that might be expected from a human child raised by beasts.&#8221;  What kind of miserable, pathetic excuse for a human being &#8211; what kind of utter want of empathy &#8211; does it take to not grok that in the kid&#8217;s inexperienced adolescent brain his bottled-up sexual urges got all tangled up with his skin hunger and that <em>this was completely reasonable</em>?</p>
<p>Another prize: &#8220;Fornication is a serious violation of the 6th Commandment, particularly if it occurs with a prostitute. One scriptural reference can be found at 1 Corinthians 6:15-20.&#8221;  If I needed any reason to despise Christians those two sentences would ring the bell.  Your Jesus tells you to act from compassion and kindness, yet you <em>dare</em> condemn in this legalistic stick-up-the-ass fashion?  I&#8217;m betting more genuine love passed between the hooker and the kid in whatever short time they spent together than the waste of oxygen who wrote those lines will ever feel.</p>
<p>All this does a pretty good job of highlighting why, as much as I loathe left-wingers, I will never, <em>ever</em> self-identify as a conservative.</p>
