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Lemonade Season

Sharon Angle, the Tea Bagger Republican running against Harry Reid,
in Nevada, thinks that if a girl has been raped she should turn that lemon
into a lemonade.   Sharon is insistent that abortion is a terrible crime,
and should never be allowed, not even in cases of rape and incest.

For instance, she was asked, what if a thirteen year-old girl were raped
by her father, and found herself pregnant?  "Two wrongs don't make a
right!" the righteous Ms. Angle replied.  Much good, she said, can come
from a situation like that. 

She did not say the girl had probably asked for it.
She did not.  I do not know how she restrained herself. 

Take any ethical rule--not a vacant "be good" rule,
but an actual rule that specifices what is good, or bad--
and make it absolute.  For instance:  that abortion
is always wrong, and you will find yourself defending
pure, awful horror.  If abortion is always wrong,
you will insist raped daughters give birth to babies.
You will have to insist that, even if the mother's life
is at stake, she must not have an abortion.  Even if
the fetus is horribly deformed, and doomed to a brief
life of pain and suffering and god-awful screaming,
you will have to insist that abortion is always wrong.

"You shall not kill, steal, lie, commit adultery, work
on the Sabbath, say "Damn!", or pick your nose.
Universal human history shows that we can give examples
of doing precisely those things, in order to be moral.

We send our children to war, steal to avoid being
starved to death in a ghetto, lie to save lives, dig like hell
to excavate trapped victims at 11:00 o'clock on Sunday,
engage in unwanted sex to save lives, and so on. 

Specific ethical rules are admonitions that experience
has shown to be useful guidelines, usually more right than wrong. 
But not always.  There are no ethical absolutes, other than
the formal admonition to try to be ethical; to do the kind and
decent thing, whatever that turns out to be.  In this case,
it means Sharon Angle should be recognized as a Senatorial
candidate with a tea bag for a brain. 

That is not a kind and decent thing to say, but it is the truth.

People who are not outraged by things like that
have a problem of their own.  The heat is getting to them.
Sharon Angle has an obvious solution for that, too.

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