Well it wouldn't be the weekend without Christopher Pearson going off at a tangent, or in the deep end over his head, or delivering a volley of snidery more sharply struck than the best tennis players to hand in the Australian Open.
You have to descend some way into the depths of rumbling in Designer baby desire will cheapen value of life to land on this little outburst about lesbians planning a baby:
Legge tells us Megan sells "products to clean coffee machines" and Leanne is described as "on leave from her human resources job", so I suppose a fair-haired, blue-eyed father who's listed as a professional can be construed as "trading up".
That's right, unlike righteous neo-con wars or the Catholic church's gaggle of pedophiles, it's designer babies that'll cheapen life. But what about snidery, and bitchery, heartily stirred together with a dose of class snobbery, and more than a little dislike of a couple of lesbians wanting to have a child?
Well here at the pond we don't know the couple, we have no idea of their parenting skills, and we don't know how their family will turn out, though we wish them well.
All we know is that they made the mistake of speaking to Kate Legge in the Weekend Australian magazine, and so became fair game for Pearson.
Sure the blonde and blue-eyed thing is a tad Germanic but possibly no more so than some dinkum Australian lad ogling a blonde blue-eyed bimbo (not we hasten to add that all blue-eyed blondes are bimbos, unlike the completely bimbo-free status of all redheads), and then getting her with child, and then regretting the impulse for the rest of his football-playing life.
That would of course be heterosexuals being "essentially frivolous", and here we're not just joking about Pearson joking about Jerry Springer.
You see, once you get on Pearson's side, you can't do anything right:
Searching thousands of computer files for the father is indeed a case of meticulous planning.
Yes, so much better, if rather than meticulous planning, they found a discarded condom in a trash can, and decided that the roulette wheel of life had delivered them up the most perfect material for a little turkey basting.
But that's the perfect Pearson gotcha - damned if you don't plan and consider things in a meticulous way, and damned if you do.
Here's another way to do a gotcha. Mock people for valuing upward social mobility, and then damn them for failing to show social mobility. Be snide about the colour of their eyes and the jobs they hold ...
Who knows if they'll make good parents? I know plenty of heterosexuals, myself included, who've made a hash of parenting - it isn't as easy as they suggested in all those advertisements commonly known as Doris Day romantic comedies - but why the bitchiness?
The couple wants the law changed to secure the non-biological half's role, claiming step-parents in heterosexual families enjoy rights that are denied to the non-birth parent in a same-sex couple. I note in passing that it's helpful, trying to get a handle on the issue, to repeat the phrase "non-birth parent" every now and then and to remember how negotiable the notion of parenthood is becoming.
I note in passing that Pearson is a goose. The notion of parenthood and parenting has always been negotiable, flexible and extendable. Parents die, parents part, new parents come on the scene, and this has been happening for a very long time. Adoption isn't a new concept, and the idea of the nuclear family is, like the concept of the teenager, a relatively new-fangled notion.
Responsibilities can slip within families (to grandparents or aunts or uncles) and without, and as someone who's had the pleasure of trying marriage a couple of times - well if you like it so much why not give it a few turns around the track - I've come to understand the idea of how negotiable the notion of parenthood can become. And I'm not the first one who's had to work out how to deal with a few cuckoos in the nest - it's nature's way that the impulse to parent can be found even in hapless birds forced to deal with stray eggs.
Pearson shows all the traits of an inflexible, pedantic, pursed-lip, peevish, pedagogic, dogmatic, narrow-minded and intolerant humbug. Try telling a child about the narrow notions of parenthood when it comes to getting by in the world - try reading a little Dickens for a start, where a startling number of his characters start out as orphans, in much the same way as bankruptcy forced Dickens to go boarding with a family friend ...
As if recognising he's strayed into dangerous waters, the hapless Pearson tries a strategic retreat, and ends his piece thus:
But I suppose in a way the plan to take motherhood in turn fortifies their case for equal rights with step-parents, at least in relation to projected half-siblings.
Megan predicts "families are going to keep changing" and has a triumphalist view of the future: "You can't stop it happening, and the law has to keep up with this."
But she complains that "we still have to explain ourselves" and says the stigma annoys her. "It's as if there is something wrong with us."
What, no commentary? No mocking implication that there is something wrong with them, because either (a) they're lesbians (b) they're lesbians who want to have children or (c) they're lesbians who value upward social mobility, as opposed to downward mobility and a life spent in the gutter?
Well there's one point, amazingly, on which the pond can agree with Pearson. It's the right of any child to know their biological parent, and this information shouldn't be hidden from them. The attempts I've seen to hide this have eventually resulted in an outing, and the truth has always helped satisfy a natural curiosity.
But is it fair to berate lesbians for their tastes and preferences, any more than the tastes and preferences of the all to often silly and foolish heterosexuals in a dominant position around the world?
Hardly. And let's not conflate this issue with the story about a couple who decided to pass on twin boys, by way of abortion, so that they could have a daughter.
But of course Pearson can't resist said conflation, that's how he opens his column, and so invites a further savaging when he writes about that couple's motivation:
Uh huh. That sounds just like an invitation to pass some kind of judgement, and so produce an opinion piece fraught with risk ...
Even so, to my mind the claim that access to IVF and the capacity to choose the sex of the baby are vital to the woman's psychological health smacks of coaching.
Smacks of coaching? And the evidence in the envelope please?
Sorry, instead we're quickly off to a guided tour of late term abortion, philosophers spouting natural law (as opposed to theology), and the intrinsic value and sacredness of human life (except in cases of crusades in Iraq and other such adventures and follies).
And somewhere the 'smacks of coaching' get lost in the smacks Pearson hands out, and we still wait on evidence that people being self-seeking or self-serving must surely have been coached. By whom and for what purpose?
Never mind and truth to tell, it doesn't sound like the kind of behaviour anyone might approve of, but Pearson is scribbling at third hand, and makes an unfortunate leap from there to lesbian land, and so by column's middle, it's on to the frivolous behaviour of the lesbians, pausing only to mention how commodified offspring is in keeping more with Mao's China than modern Australia, an interesting conflation of the one child policy with the notion of bringing more children into the world ...
But there you go, that's the way it is with conservative Catholics, raging about the doing down of embryos, and then muttering about the use of artificial insemination to bring forth embryos, and then consternated by the notion of lesbians having children, and then when all else fails, and snidery exhausts itself, railing about planning and choice (try removing the constitutional right to choice from the land of the free!), and then getting jaundiced by triumphalist lesbians upset by the need to explain themselves and so on and on, and on and on ... until I quite nod off some times.
Meanwhile speaking of the suffering of the children, there's a little flapdoodle going on, which you won't read about in Pearson, involving the Catholic Church. It involves a 1997 letter, which you can find in full as a pdf at this New York Times address, here, and once you cut through all the bureaucratic jargon - why is Vatican scribbling so dense and opaque? - it seems to be rebuking the Irish church for straying outside Vatican-approved procedures, and wanting to involve secular authorities in the matter of priests behaving badly with children. Here's a sample:
The New York Times has been very hot to trot on the matter - publishing an editorial Missing Mandate From Rome, citing chapter and verse of bad behaviour by Rome (in the matter of notorious abuser Tony Walsh, who persuaded a Vatican court to give him back his collar), and giving more background in Vatican Letter Warned Bishops on Abuse Policy, but others have picked it up, including Sky News, with Irish catholic priest abuse.These many sordid matters, deeds and actions took place during the reign of John Paul II, whom Ratzinger now seeks to make a saint. (Sex abuse scandals line John Paul's road to sainthood).
So it goes. The saintly church at work ...
Still, it provides a handy tip for lesbians seeking children and social approval.
Why not involve yourself in superstitious mumbo jumbo, cover ups and mystical transubstantiated nonsense about cannibalising flesh and blood, and next thing you know, Pearson will be clapping you on your back and wishing your way clear to a happy nuclear family of guilt, sexual frustration and turmoil, and church-determined conflict with whatever sexual identity the absent god deemed fitting for you ...
But is it fair, you mutter, to link Catholic church misdeeds about children with lesbians seeking children? Of course not, but this is Pearson land, and week in and week out, he's trained us in the art of being unfair ...
And so to a few gay cartoons:
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