THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS IDEA: All families are equal
From the halls of academe to the hills of Hollywood the cry of ‘family diversity’ rings out ever more confidently.
Let’s start with a little warm-up exercise. Here are three people who have made pronouncements on the family: a government advisor on families and parenting; a filmstar; an academic. See if you can correctly match them with the following quotations:
“Twenty-first century American families come in a dazzling array of sizes, shapes, colours, and gender-slash-generational patterns. This reality deserves to be reflected in the literature that children read. Until recently, however, children’s books have privileged a paradigm of homogeneity and heterosexuality.”
“…what is it that defines family? It isn’t necessarily the traditional mother, father, two children and a dog named Spot. Love is love and family is what is around you and who is in your immediate sphere.”
“People are constantly redefining what it means to be a family. What we are seeing is that family shape is changing all the time, the notion of a traditional nuclear family … certainly isn’t the norm now. … What policy-makers must not do is … [try] to reverse the tide of trends by trying to encourage more ‘traditional families’.”
Not very difficult, was it? The new “paradigm” lady is clearly the academic — Ellen Handler Spitz, Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland. Film star Jennifer Aniston came up with the “what is around you” (including Spot, no doubt) line apropos of her role in the upcoming movie, Switch. And the “what we are seeing” pitch came from the CEO of the UK’s Family and Parenting Institute, Dr Katherine Rake.
From the halls of academe to the hills of Hollywood, from Washington to Westminster and Wellington (the New Zealand seat of government), the cry of “family diversity” rings out ever more confidently and passionately. And the range of family forms grows ever more bizarre. Indeed, if Jennifer Aniston’s idea — that a family is simply “what” is immediately around you — takes hold, Spot may soon be named Second Parent in a household where he does more childcare than the absent dad.
Groups of people may call themselves a family if they want to; we are not concerned about private preferences here but about public recognition. When it comes to public support, both moral and material, the family in focus is the one with dependent, minor children. And since children are first and foremost the responsibility of the parents who begot them, the normative family recognised by society should ideally include both parents. This is what we know as the nuclear family.
And it is, by the way, the norm implied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the charter from which our modern sense of human rights and dignity depends. Here is what Article 16 says:
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It’s a shame that religionists are so reliant on exclusionary mentalities to shape their define their desired worlds. It’s great to talk about ideals but how does that mean those that are less than ideals don’t count? I see the government gives out Pell Grants to students, whether they go to Harvard (the ideal) or to a community college (an expedient). To say to the children of same-sex couples that their families are flawed or worth less is sick and twisted, to say the least. Why don’t we just go back to the days of telling black people they’re inferior?
Just imagine the horror that would result from children feeling affirmed in whatever family situation they are raised! That is terrible, just terrible, I tell you!!! No, we must teach these children that their families are bad, bad, bad if they don’t include a hetero and biologically-related mommy and daddy. Children who are raised in the hetero-bio-nuclear mold are obviously a superior caste of human beings!! When will people understand that love is not what matters in a family–our very civilization depends on men and women performing in accordance with strict gender roles and passing the virtues of judgmentalist attitudes on to their children! The sky is falling, the sky is falling, aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
See http://abcnews.go.com/Health/sperm-donors-admit-fathering-hundreds-children-call-regulation/story?id=11431918
Sperm donors make about $1,200 month, donating three times a week for many years. “But that doesn’t mean there are three potential children…Every sample is broken out into eight to 25 vials for 75 potential children every week he donates.”
…
“Tim Gullicksen, a 43-year-old real estate salesman from San Francisco, donated for a decade after signing up as a college student at Berkeley. He said he was promised only 10 families would get his sperm but now, “it’s pretty clear there are 80 or 90 kids out there….”
The first child to contact him three years ago through DSR was a 9-year-old boy in Texas whose single mother had chosen sperm donation.
“He had five years of stuff for me when I met him and right after that everything started to snowball,” said Gullicksen.
“He had been pestering his mom about where his dad was since he was a toddler,” he said. “He had no father figure and he actually kept a box under his bed where he kept all his school projects and wrote ‘Daddy’ on the box.”
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The kids might be all right, but then, maybe not. This strikes me as a tough burden to lay on a child, not to mention on the donor when he realizes the size of the family he has created. Welcome to the brave new world.
I know Heidi! Just imagine the joy of a child being affirmed as a bastard! Not because Daddy was a scumbag — no, not even because Mommy was drunk and stupid and please forgive me! You’re a bastard because I WANTED you to be that way and made it happen on purpose!
Go on, search high and low for your “father” but you’ll never ever find him because I made sure you cannot! Muhuahahaahahaha!
No, no sky is falling. Just one more fatherless boy left wondering why his mom hated his father so much that she cut him out of both of their lives….
Heidi, honey, when are you going to stop pretending that anything other than one man and one woman can create a child? Why do you insist on lying about “strict gender roles” when you know as well as anyone that a lesbian woman and a gay man can make a baby, but two lesbians or two gay men cannot?
Gender “roles” doesn’t really have anything to do with anything anymore does it? Surely you of all people would admit to that. And yet… there is still one man and one woman…
Ah yes, Marty, it does take a sperm and an egg to create a baby, but it doesn’t take a married heterosexual man and woman to raise one! My two kids are living proof. My older daughter has one daddy and three mommies. My younger daughter has two mommies, neither one carried her and gave birth to her. And yet, both girls are happy, healthy, beautiful children. A BASTARD? Really? Too bad we don’t follow those terribly outdated and stupid rules anymore. My daughter’s father and I never married. And yet, there has never been any difficulty that my child has faced because of that. Do you live in the 1950s or what?
Funny, I don’t know of any fatherless boys hating mommy because she cut dad out of his life. I DO know several fatherless boys who hate daddy because he abandoned his little boy and left mommy to raise him all by herself. Leo, you left out the part of the article that talked about that little boy being raised by a single mother. Hmmm…that might cause a child to miss a parent that is missing, huh? But when children HAVE two parents who love, nurture and raise them, they’re not missing anything. Go meet some kids being raised by same-sex couples and ask them yourself. Funny, none of you anti-gay folks have done that…wonder why? Are you afraid to learn that the kids really ARE okay?
Marty, it really doesn’t matter who makes the baby. It matters who raises the baby. Heterosexual parents walk away from their children all of the time (usually the dads). Heterosexual parents sometimes neglect and abuse their children. And quite frequently, it is same-sex couples who take those poor children in–my own family included. Except these families are not treated equally under the law, just because some people think we should still be living in the 1950s.
@Sean
So many non-sequitors–where do I start?
“Religionists”? After I read your comment, I went back and reread Carolyn’s entire column, including the part on the external website. Nowhere did she mention religion, God, church, sin or any other religious concept. To dismiss her arguments as being “religionist” seems like a knee-jerk reaction on your part.
Harvard is the “ideal” and community college is only “expedient”? That’s a pretty elitist point of view. If I want to become a nurse, then community college (as a prep for nursing school) would be ideal–Harvard would be a stupid waste of money.
“Why don’t we just go back to the days of telling black people they’re inferior?” What wall did that bounce off of? Do you actually mean that anyone who disagrees with you must be a racist? That’s not a very logical statement; but then, that’s probably not what you meant. Your parting shot was more likely intended to scare people into shutting up, lest they be thought a bigot.
I disagree with Heidi’s position, but at least she is making some coherent arguments, based on her own experience. What are your logical responses, Sean, to the points Carolyn made in her article?