Posted on 12/23/2001 6:26:24 AM PST by Mopp4
A terminally ill boy had his dying wish granted in Australia this month, but ethicists are still at odds over whether it was the right thing to do.
The wish was not for a trip to Disneyland or to meet a famous sports star. Instead, the 15-year-old wanted to lose his virginity before he died of cancer. The boy, who remains anonymous but was called Jack by the Australian media, did not want his parents to know about his request. Because of his many years spent in the hospital, he had no girlfriend or female friends.
Jack died last week, but not before having his last wish granted. Without the knowledge of his parents or hospital staff, friends arranged an encounter with a prostitute outside of hospital premises. All precautions were taken, and the organizers made sure the act was fully consensual. The issue has sparked fierce debate over the legal and ethical implications of granting the boy's request. By law, Jack was still a child, and the woman involved could in theory face charges for having sex with a minor. The debate was sparked by the hospital's child psychologist, who wrote a letter to "Life Matters," a radio show in which academics debate ethical and moral dilemmas. The scenario was presented in the abstract, with no details about the boy's identity.
"He had been sick for quite a long period, and his schooling was very disrupted, so he hadn't had many opportunities to acquire and retain friends, and his access to young women was pretty poor," the psychologist said recently in an interview with Australia's Daily Telegraph newspaper. "But he was very interested in young women and was experiencing that surge of testosterone that teenage boys have." Hospital staff initially wanted to pool donations to pay for a prostitute, but the ethical and legal implications prevented them from doing so. The psychologist presented members of the clergy with the dilemma and found no clear answer. "It really polarized them," he said. "About half said, 'What's your problem?' And the other half said [it] demeans women and reduces the sexual act to being just a physical one."
Dr. Stephen Leeder, dean of medicine at the University of Sydney and a "Life Matters" panelist, said the issue was a difficult one. "I pointed out that public hospitals operated under the expectation that they would abide by state law," he said. "While various things doubtless are done that are at the edge of that, it's important the public has confidence that the law will be followed." Jack's psychologist, who works with children in palliative care, said the desire was driven in part by a need for basic human contact. "In a child dying over a long period of time, there is often a condition we call 'skin hunger,'" he said. The terminally ill child yearns for non-clinical contact because "mostly when people touch them, it's to do something unpleasant, something that might hurt." Leeder called the diagnosis "improbable." Judy Lumby, the show's other panelist and the executive director of the New South Wales College of Nursing, argued that the details as presented made it abundantly clear the boy's wish ought to be granted. "I said that I would try my darndest as a nurse to do whatever I could to make sure his wish came true," she said. "I just think we are so archaic in the way we treat people in institutions. Certainly, if any of my three daughters were dying, I'd do whatever I could, and I'm sure that you would, too." National Post
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other." -John Adams, Oct. 11, 1798 Address to the military
"Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private virtue, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics." -John Adams
"We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God." -James Madison
"A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security." -Samuel Adams
"[N]either the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen onto any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man." -Samuel Adams
"Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants." -William Penn
"Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." -Patrick Henry
"[I]f we and our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us, that shall bury all our glory in profound obscurity." -Daniel Webster
Short answer: It isn't. But then these advocates are not conservatives, but moral-liberal humanist ideologues no better or different from the DNC, the Greens, or the Trotskyite Spartacist League.
But, the situation is in Australia, the community the boy is from might very well hold a view such as I do that it does not go against the moral code of our chosen sacred text (Torah), and if that was, or is, the case, well then the family would take care of the child according to tradition.
Which still leaves me utterly flabbergasted that hundreds of people here have decided that the boy is in hell and thats that and that unnecessary risks were taken. Which was (mistakenly) how I got on this topic with you.
When you use the imperative tense it just comes out sounding all foolish.
Your absolutely right! There is nothing wrong at all with sex and the desire for it.. In fact it's the best thing there probably is and it's what keeps the world going around.
But, there is a Godly way to it.. a way that world can never understand.
He did not create us in a junkyard dogs image, but His. It's sad this child had no other desire to look forward to before his eternal destiny was reached. It was not God who made this boy sick, That's not what His Word teaches and it's not His will that any of His creation go through such a tradgedy. You've been lied to.
I doubt that 100 people have even posted to this thread, and I would venture that no more than one person had so stated what you accuse hundreds of saying. Your flabbergastation is purely delusional.
I hope my fall is only an apparent one. I do not treat individual reason as the sole tool by which an individual learns morality; such learning takes place in a community with its own traditions and mores. The brilliant philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre criticizes modern liberalism(perhaps even the whole Enlightenment project) for its attempt to set up a rationality and a culture independent of any tradition. However, I propose that some of these moral codes are in fact more than custom, true and rationally provable, and that these cultural customs, morals, and rational discussions are attempts at expressing these truths, however imperfect means they may be.
FYI, FR's estimable Betty Boop posted a selection of MacIntyre HERE
Thats where I though you were heading. I cannot say that I believe fully in this; however, I do see the impact of new norms that have been wedded into Judasim as cultures have mixed over the last ~2400 years. Are these truths that have evolved in response to enviroment? That is where I have a little problem with this. Maybe it is naive on my behalf, but I do put stock in the notion that the mores were there all along in sacred writings (from time immemorial) for people who wished to follow them.
Me: I doubt that 100 people have even posted to this thread, ...
You: You wouldn't have to "venture" a guess if you had actually read the entire thread of comments...
Which I have done. Provide an accurate accounting of the "hundreds of people here" who have so claimed the boy is in hell, if you can.
Your high-minded ideals might sound good to you inside your own head, but luckily the rest of us live in the real world.
A 15 year old kid is dying, he's not going to get married, have kids, grow old, or anything that you and I take for granted. If it was my son/nephew, I'd have done anything to make that kid happy and if you think that's immoral I feel sorry for you.
Well. That explains a lot. That's too bad. Normal people are taught to acknowledge their sexuality and the necessity for sex as a normal part of normal development.
This reminds me of an old joke. Several people are on a passenger plane, when suddenly it begins to descend rapidly, and the captain says, "we're all going to die." A young girl, maybe sixteen, looks at an older boy on the flight and says, "I want to feel like a woman before I die."
He takes off his shirt... and hands it to her. He says, "iron this."
What you or I think is really immaterial. God says something is wrong, it is wrong regardless of the rationalizations you or I make. Take it up with Him if you have a problem with morality and ethical values.
Time for your medication.
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