Doesn’t it hurt? Don’t they get headaches?

Campaigns and expressions of habitual revision tend to verge on the ironic, like much of the angry left has. Take for example the graphic below. On one level it makes a nice t-shirt graphic for the expression of gayness (as if that by itself was some sort of virtue), but where I have seen it mostly is in the context of anti-corporate movement silliness. As if the plank for your home hade music CDs could be made by a beekeeper…

Selling hoagies bad. Being treated like a Hoagie or any other inanimate object good… Being a homophobic far leftist - bad if not worse - any way you shake it.

Empowered Victimhood – if that makes any sense to you please let know how.

Alas it gets better – even the Prison Fellowship is chiming in on another area of leftist headbanging: how is it that prostitution (sorry, that’s “sex work” now) can be ‘empowering’, but still cause misery, human trafficking, and other things that turn the core of a being into little more than a commodity. On every level it’s worse than someone selling their organs.

«In an article titled “Prostitution Gives Me Power,” the fashion magazine Marie Claire praised the lives of three “sex workers” in Holland for “using their bodies to foster trust, compassion, and happiness in the world.” One woman said that working for a brothel or escort business allowed for a connection because “you’re there for a couple of hours” and “talk much more.” Of course, any sort of “connection” she may think she’s making is a false one. The transaction is commercial; she is a commodity to be purchased. And no matter how she packages that, it’s dehumanizing.

As Ambassador John Miller, head of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at the State Department, wrote in a letter to Marie Claire, “[W]here prostitution is legal or illegal but tolerated, there is a greater demand for human trafficking victims,” because local women don’t view prostitution as “legitimate or desirable,” and so “crime networks fill the void.”

Moreover, says Miller, recent academic research in nine countries “found that 57 percent of women in prostitution were raped, 73 percent were physically assaulted, and 68 percent [qualified] for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” Eighty-nine percent of those women said they wanted to “escape” their situation.

“The U.S. Government has come to oppose legalized prostitution,” Miller wrote, “not only because it is inherently harmful and dehumanizing, but also because it creates a thriving marketplace for victims of human trafficking. This connection cannot be disregarded if we are to be serious about ending modern-day slavery.” And that’s why it’s so important that you and I continue to urge implementation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. It is up for reauthorization this year. There are still problems we need to address more strongly.

The number of persons trafficked across borders is between 600,000 and 900,000. And estimates of the number trafficked into the United Stated ranges from about 15,000 by government records up to 50,000 according to anti-slavery activists.

Now, don’t think that legitimizing prostitution as a “good” to be sold is simply the argument of magazines like Marie Claire. When Bill Bennett and I first approached the Clinton administration in the mid-nineties to get them to stop sex trafficking, we ran into a stone wall. The feminist position was, believe it or not, being accepted, that this was empowering women. Slavery—empowerment? That’s a dangerous newspeak, but it’s exactly what we’re up against in this culture. And it’s the reason that Christians today have to fight against modern-day slavery. This is a human-rights abuse that must be ended.»

It seems painfully obvious that a large part of the whole feminist political movement is trapped in a rhetorical train-wreck by the “empowerment/slavery” paradox which resembles a complex of the psyche. To maintain the fiction of their causes they have to pass it on to their college recruits. It’s an irresponsible meme to pass on to a group of people who are increasingly able to hook up, but increasingly incapable of being trusted or loved, and are bing modeled into this to advance an obsolete .

Next comes the habit, the unending, repetitious desire to regulate for what the shallowest of thinkers determine to be a ‘greater good’. From Spiked-Online via John Ray’s excellent PC-Watch blog:

«…there is a new strain of moral opprobrium spreading through the body social. We all have an ever-swelling inventory of things we feel we ought not to do - both because lobbies or pressure groups suggest they damage the common good and because our friends might like us less if they knew we did them. Green campaigners tell us to question whether we really ought to take long-haul flights. Health campaigners invite us not to give sweets to one another. Safety campaigners insist we drive at much lower speeds. There is a censor at every corner.

This universe of one-issue agit-prop has one abiding, perhaps under-noticed feature. And that is what we might call insatiable incrementalism. As restraints on behaviour are ever more formalised in the name of the common good, so lobbies have a habit of not disappearing. Indeed, even though the world, by their lights, may have been measurably improved by the success of a particular campaign, their politically monotone clamour can remain as loud as ever.»

With internal contradictions that great is it any wonder that psychiatry is still a great business?