The Harder Questions

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• The Harder Question for 23 January 2010 – Reflecting on the tremendous number of children who are going to be orphaned by the tragedy in Haiti, overall how do you feel about children being adopted by parents of another race/ethnicity/faith?
• The Harder Question for 27 January 2010 – Your spouse/significant other sits you down to tell you something that is obviously difficult for him/her to share. You can see that by the look on his/her face. After a long silence, your spouse/significant other confesses to having an affair/cheating with a person who is the same gender as s/he or if you’re in a same-gender relationship, your spouse/significant other confesses to having an affair/cheating with a person who is the opposite gender as s/he. What do you do?
• The Harder Question for 01 February 2010 – It is an absolute certainty, beyond any doubt, that your child will be born with a severe disability that will cause pain and suffering until the day of his/her death, which is predicted to come within months after his/her birth. To compound the issue this is a high-risk pregnancy for you (or your wife/significant other), and you (or your wife//significant other) have been hospitalized several times already during the pregnancy. You find out about the disability in plenty of time to terminate the pregnancy before the law says you can’t. What do you do?
• The Harder Question for 03 February 2010 – At this point in American History, should we get rid of heritage months (e.g., Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Native American Heritage Month, etc.)?
• The Harder Question for 04 February 2010 – At this point in world and national events, and looking back over the past year and what could possibly be ahead of us, was history ready for an African-American President of the United States?
• The Harder Question for 09 February 2010 – You meet someone to whom you’re highly attracted. You all really hit it off and begin to date exclusively. After several months, you express to your significant other that you’d like to take your relationship to a sexual level. If your significant other is a woman, she tells you that she battled breast cancer and won but lost both breasts to a double mastectomy. If your significant other is a man, he tells you that he fought prostate cancer and won but he’s unable to sustain an erection and none of the alternative treatments have been successful. How does this new information affect the way you feel about your significant other?
• The Harder Question for 15 February 2010 – As parents, we want the best for our children, and we want to be able to protect them from all the pain and suffering this world has to offer. Thinking about that, would you rather your child have an incurable, but non-life-threatening, disease or be gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender?
• The Harder Question for 20 February 2010 – Do children from interracial/interreligion (biracial/bireligion) relationships have a harder time establishing their identity than children whose parents are of the same race/religion?
• The Harder Question for 26 February 2010 – Do you think castrating (chemically or physically) convicted pedophiles would deter such behavior in others?
• The Harder Question for 27 February 2010 – Studies show that most children don’t remember things that have happened to them if they occur before the age of four. Keeping that in mind, if you are the caregiver of a child, who at the age of three, got hold to a handgun and accidentally shot and killed a sibling/cousin/friend of about the same age, would you eventually tell him/her when he/she’s old enough to understand the ramifications of such actions?
• The Harder Question for 04 March 2010 – Someone you love dearly and deeply has an incurable and extremely painful illness that has kept him/her bedridden for the past several months. No medical treatments can ease the pain and suffering and their final days are dragging on and on with no conclusive end in sight. Your dear loved one gives you an envelope and asks you not to read it for three days. He/she asks you to go to his/her medicine cabinet and bring him/her back the two bottles of sleeping pills that are on the top shelf, and then he/she asks you to cut your visit short and not to return until the same time tomorrow and not a minute sooner. What do you do?
• The Harder Question for 12 March 2010 – Why is telling people, “No,” such a challenging ordeal?
• The Harder Question for 07 April 2010 – The Harder Question: Your teenager is in need of a kidney transplant, and fortunately you and your teen’s other parent are both viable donors. You and his/her other parent decide it will be the other parent who gives your teenager the kidney, and the operation is performed successfully. The doctors give your teenager instructions about being very careful to take his/her anti-rejection medications as instructed or the kidney will fail. For several weeks, your teen does really well with following the doctor’s instructions, but after awhile your teen doesn’t think he/she needs the medication, so he/she stops taking it regularly. Eventually, your teen stops taking the medication all together. You notice your teen is getting sicker and sicker, and every time you ask if he/she is taking the anti-rejection medicine as instructed, he/she tells you yes. You come home from work to find your teen passed out on the floor of the kitchen and non-responsive. You call for an ambulance, and you all are rushed to the hospital. After several tense hours, your teen’s doctor comes out to tell you and your teen’s other parent that he/she is going into kidney failure again, because he/she hasn’t been taking his/her anti-rejection medication. The doctor tells you all that another transplant is going to be necessary, because the first transplanted kidney is no longer viable. What do you do?
• The Harder Question for 14 July 2010 – Why is it that when a white person speaks against President Obama the automatic assumption is that the person is racist?