Deceptive, Misleading and Depraved

National Cognitive Dissonance

Ah, the hypocrisy of it all.  Festooned on page three of  the NZ Herald this morning is the latest beneficiary cause celebre  being played up by left wing politicians.  A mother of two, on the Domestic Purposes Benefit, is threatening to become a prostitute so she can afford tertiary training.  The welfare payment benefit she receives is not enough to cover the extra costs of tuition.  The headline screams: "Mum: Prostitution to Pay for Studies."

Why, we ask, is this up front and centre in the news?  Why would two left wing politicians take this amoral woman up as a cause celebre for beneficiaries, parading her before the media, flying her to Wellington to parade her at press conferences?  It smacks of high-order hypocrisy.
  About six years ago the government of New Zealand declared, in its benighted wisdom, that prostitution was a perfectly moral profession, deserving all kinds of state licensing and protection.  Except that it is not--and the actions of both the NZ Herald in highlighting the case and the leftie politicians, Labour MP Jacinda Ardern and Green MP Jan Logie betray that prostitution is actually both degraded and evil and is not an acceptable occupation and they know it. And they know that the rest of New Zealand knows it as well. 

Would the pollies be up in arms, and the NZ Herald hyper-ventilating if the woman in question was going to take a part-time job at McDonalds to help pay her tuition costs?  Of course not.  It is prostitution which makes this an opportunity for political theatre and selling newspapers to proclaim how niggardly our Domestic Purposes Benefit is.  Why?  Because most people recoil from prostitution in disgust.  Rightfully so.  How could we allow this poor woman be "forced" into such desperate degradation.

We are thankful that the national disgust with prostitution is the case.  However, what Ardern and Logie and the NZ Herald unwittingly demonstrate is that the law "normalising" prostitution as a legitimate and ethical calling is itself unjust, unethical, and evil.  Likewise, the pollies who voted for it (under the guise of care and protection of prostitutes of course) did an evil thing, regardless of their intentions and motives.

The law of God, we are told in Holy Writ, is inscribed upon every human heart.  You have to work really hard to erase its witness to our sense of right and wrong.  It is one of the things that keeps even an amoral and unethical society functioning, holding back that terrible integration into the void.  Most people abhor prostitution, regardless of what the law says.  When a society or culture becomes so pervasively evil that it works really hard to erase the testimony of God's Law to the conscience, things begin to fly apart.  Such a progressive degeneracy usually takes three or four generations.  We are well on the way.

In the meantime, we find ironical encouragement in the protestations of Mesdames Ardern and Logie and the NZ Herald over the would-be prostitute.  It tells us something unexpected about NZ society, for which we are thankful.  It also tells us that Adern and Logie are up to their ears in self-serving, self-righteous hypocrisy and breathtaking chutzpah.  But then again no surprises there.