Excuse me while I get on a soapbox....

One of the joys of the blog I think is the ability to voice your opinion without the pesky interference of having to engage in dialogue with people that disagree with you. However in the real world it doesn’t work like that…

...cue recent conversation with friend about defence lawyers and sex-offenders….

Friend: I don’t know how anyone can defend paedophiles…. How can anyone justify that to themselves?

Me: (cue getting ranty) well seeing as it's such a highly paid and regarded area of law I’m guessing that their the lawyers that really believe that everyone deserves representation

Friend: yeah but I just don’t know how you can justify to yourself defending paedophiles….

Me: well if you believe that people have the right to a fair trial or to be presumed innocent until guilty or equality and don’t believe in it for everyone then isn’t that just hypocritical (I can be annoyingly self-righteous when I’m ranting….)

Friend: so would you ever work with them…

Me: yeah, probably

Friend: yeah well… I just don’t understand how you could do that?

I’ve noticed recently that I tend to have surrounded myself with friends who have alarmingly similar world-views. I think we are all pretty far down the bleeding heart left-wing spectrum. I’m a little unsure how this friend slipped through the net....

I did a placement a couple of years ago at a clinic for adolescent sex offenders. I remember talking to the manager about how he coped with the job, he was definitely someone who saw the grey around the edges of life and people and he had three young kids himself. He said this gave him more of vested interest in making the world a little safer. He also told me that he told cab drivers he was a salesman … it was easier apparently than the constant justifications, arguments, listening to people on their soap-boxes. I really admired him. I’m sure he could have been making a shit-load more money somewhere else without having to justify it to cab-drivers….

Also…. Completely unrelated and off the topic… actually no I think I can use the whole left-wing angle as a segue way.... while cruising some other people’s blog’s I found this quote from Maxine McKew talking about her work as a journalist which I found very entertaining……

"People have a nervous collapse when I've actually broken through and got someone to say something honest. It is either regarded as a gaffe, or people say they must have been drunk, or publicly musing aloud, or they didn't realise the tape was running, or I must have had oral sex with them under the table. I find it absurd."

I’m guessing now that she’s a politician she won’t be able to throw around the phrase “oral sex with them under the table” quite as freely.