This post is about me. I am empathy-deficient. What should be a touching story leaves me feeling nothing but contempt: a United States Senator empathizing with a federal inmate serving two consecutive life sentences who wanted to father a child. Through this empathetic Senator’s efforts, the inmate has successfully impregnated his wife.

I do not feel empathy for a jailed criminal who thinks he is entitled to be a father. Conjugal visits are prohibited at the federal level, so I see no need to employ a workaround (artificial insemination) to circumvent a natural consequence of the rules, particularly for such a contemptuous character. The empathetic senator suffers no such pedant reasoning.