Word: shame
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...problem." Indeed, as poets, philosophers, theologians and scientists agree, it is a tyrannical passion of overwhelming strength. Sexual desire is too strong to be controlled by reason or natural law derived from reason. It can only be controlled by a force of comparable power, and that is shame...
...Shame is a notion missing from Macedo's statement but present in every sexual situation. The need for shame makes it impossible to leave sex to adults consenting in private, because consent needs to be backed up by social agreement on what is shameful. Women, in particular, need the weapon of shame to defend themselves from being bullied and battered by men. Homosexuality is an open challenge to society's sense of shame, as the gays recognize quite well. For if the practices of homosexuals are not shameful, what...
...around to fill the void. If the mother's drug use had caused her family to spurn her, relatives may be unwilling to care for her kids. Moreover, the stigma of AIDS causes many families to keep the cause of death quiet. The surviving children are isolated in their shame. "If they know, they usually don't tell anybody," Clymore notes. "Not their best friend, not their teachers, not anybody...
Social and health agencies are trying to reach more AIDS sufferers before they pass away so that their children can be better prepared. That's not easy. Denial and shame are sometimes so strong that some parents never admit, to officials or anyone else, that they have AIDS. Marina Alvarez is not one of them. She founded a support group in the Bronx, New York, for mothers like herself who are HIV positive. "Information dispels fear," she says. "I can't say that my sons are absolutely O.K. with my illness. I don't think anybody's ever O.K. with...
...marriage, about homosexual activity, soon perhaps even about pederasty, are all not merely left to the individual, but the very suggestion that such choices might be criticized--that there might be some ground other than individual whim for making them--is denounced as "bigotry" or "harmful prejudice." Is nothing shameful, nothing harmful, so long as "consent" is not violated? It is a sad commentary on the current state of sexual morality and of society in general that, all sense of shame having been extinguished or suppressed, only the fear of death is left to serve as a check on human...