Sweet Child, Mine Accuser

I saw a news feature on PBS the other evening about children in Africa, thousands upon thousands, who are having to raise themselves and their siblings because their parents have died of HIV/AIDS. There are numerous attendant social problems, as one can imagine. Many in schools and churches give assistance, and governments give financial aid, often used improperly. The central fact, though, is that there are children children children languishing without parental nurture or training, without the benefit of wise counselors from whose loins they have sprung, without the benefit of those who care only for them and who guide them as only parents can, who provide them with that sense of self and stewardship so needed to survive and thrive, that only involved parents can provide. This, beyond the obvious physical needs that go pathetically, anguishingly neglected.
Later, musing over this poignant reality, it struck me that every such child stands as accuser of those who, in this and all the “civilized” countries of the West and East, claim that sexual freedom is a civil right. Those children live in serious jeopardy of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness because “civil rights” were imposed upon them by their society, and by those who birthed them and then left them orphans.
“Yes,” they say, “tell me that sexual intercourse is the right and privilege of every male and female who finds himself attracted to any other male or female. Tell me that my coming in to life HIV-infected myself, only to lose a parent before ever I learned to toddle, thence to be thrown under the care of a 16-year-old big sister, herself an HIV/AIDS-infected single mother and responsible for five other siblings as well, is all well and good, and all a necessary sacrifice at the altar of civil rights-insured sexual freedom."
How many canaries do we need before we understand that the oxygen we think we're breathing is really some deadly toxin?