Stories like this one in the Daily Mail are precisely why secular progressives should not be trusted with our children:
A Liberal Democrat councillor has told a party conference that schools could suggest prostitution as a career to pupils. Dennis Parsons, who is chairman of the Cheltenham Liberal Democrats, made the comment during a special session on sex work. The retired civil servant said school career officers are currently not allowed to mention prostitution as a potential line of work, but added: ‘Why shouldn’t they?’
Mr Parsons also compared prostitution with accountancy when discussing how to combat the stigma attached to sex work. Lib Dem leader Tim Farron distanced himself from his remarks, but revealed he will not ‘slap down’ Mr Parsons for making the statement as people should be allowed to say ‘shocking things’. Mr Parsons, a married father-of-five, said: ‘The fact that we are asking “should we seek to prevent people entering sex work?” is part of the problem.
‘You wouldn’t ask the question “should we prevent people becoming accountants?” You’d just take it for granted. There is a stronger case, probably, for that than there is for preventing sex work. We have had a chap suggest that one of the areas we need to be concerned about was families coercing people to go into the sex trade. Well, again, you wouldn’t protest at families urging and coercing people into becoming accountants.’
‘And even in this room full of liberals we have got a huge cultural problem that we do see sex work as different. We see it as something a little bit tacky, and not quite nice, and not the sort of thing that we would want our sons and daughters to get involved in. We talk about schools – how many schools are going to have careers officers say to people, “have you thought about prostitution?” It’s not going to happen. And that’s a cultural thing. Why shouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t they?’
Mr Parsons claims to be an ‘old-fashioned Liberal’ and spent most of his career in London while also working as First Secretary in the British Embassy in Tokyo.
It’s staggering to consider just how little Mr. Parsons must know about the sex trade in order to spout off such dangerous nonsense. That he could suggest, with a straight face, that parents should perhaps embrace the idea of their daughters selling their bodies to strange men and their sons treating women like human blow-up dolls is an indictment of the liberal mind. I wonder if there are any parents who would react to Mr. Parsons’ comments with approval.
Opposition to prostitution isn’t simply a “cultural thing,” although what Mr. Parsons means when he says that is that the Judeo-Christian values that once informed the moral value judgements of people in the West should be dispensed with, seeing as how teachers cannot suggest to their impressionable charges that perhaps being a hooker might be a good idea. Opposition to prostitution is grounded in the reality that it is, for most of those in the “sex trade,” an awful, degrading life and a horrifying experience. I’m not quite sure why Mr. Parsons would indicate otherwise, or what experiences have persuaded him that “sex work” is a perfectly lovely profession.
As I mentioned yesterday, progressive politicians feel entitled to force their worldview on the children of other people, and this must be resisted by those who feel that these politicians have no business anywhere near their children at all costs. They have their own ideological agenda, and they plan on ensuring that your children receive the indoctrination they believe essential to the society they want to create. Or in Mr. Parsons’ case, perhaps the last line of the Daily Mail’s column gives away the reason for his strangely enthusiastic embrace of prostitution and the promotion of “sex work” to children:
Delegates heard that decriminalising prostitution would raise £1 billion a year for the Treasury in taxes.
For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.
