(no subject)

[rozk]

One of the most irritating things about waking up to the Today programme - BBC Radio 4 news magazine lasting from 6 to 9 - is that you sometimes find homophobic ranting obtruding into your dreams at just the point where you want to stay asleep and do not need to wake up in a blind adrenalin-fueled WHO IS THIS IDIOT fury. There is a case that one should just forget about it and snuggle back into the pillow and one's sweetie and the hot-water bottle and the plush dinosaurs, but alas! I brood and mutter and don't get back to sleep even if I needed to.

So, today it was the House of Lords debate on IVF for lesbian couples and the thing that really struck me about it was the sheer impotent bilious spite of it all. After all, it is not as if they can stop lesbian couples bringing up children and they have failed to stop lesbian couples adopting children - those ships have sailed and they lost, dammit. So what they are doing is actually picking on lesbian couples who happen to have infertility problems to be spiteful.

You had Lord McKay making laddish jokes about how things may have changed but they still need a man in the mix somewhere - and at right that moment I found myself hoping that the crusty old bigot lives to see lesbians having children through shared genetic material because it might actually cause him pain. You had someone else saying that it should be opposed because men's fragile egos would not cope with the idea of their being unneeded - which is a good example of how victim arguments get abused by the Right. Worst of all, you had the Archbishop of York arguing that this was an example of consumerist culture - he equated the desire of lesbian women for children with wanting to go shopping.

The thing about this is not just that it is demeaning and insulting to people's deepest feelings - it is that he really is a bigot and he really does despise lesbians. Here's why - he claims that the right of a child to a father outweighs the desire of two women to have a child without one. However, he is also saying that the right of a not-yet existent child to a father outweights not only their desire but also the possible right of that non-existent child to exist. Logically, therefore, he is saying that the right of a child to a father outweighs its right to exist at all in any other circumstances where it does not have a father.

I don't think that Archbishop Setantu is arguing for the compulsory abortion of all children of unmarried or lesbian mothers which means that his statements do not mean what he says they do. He is just, as so many religious folk do, making stuff up. He knows, because he is not a stupid man, that the evidence is strong that two or more parents of all genders are a good environment for a child, certainly better than two parents that include a drunken, violent or abusive father or mother. He chooses to fetishize heterosexual arrangements irrespective of the interests of the child, then, in direct contradistinction to what he says he is doing. He is a liar and a bigot who does not have the courage of his bigotry.

I wish these remarks to be taken in evidence next time I criticize other religions.

Comments

[jasonelvis.livejournal.com]

Oh Roz, you have such a wonderful brain. I love how, for you, initial fury is followed by thinking it through and presenting an argument. I tend to get stuck on the fury!

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

I love that argument, and may be using it daily from now on.

[time-freak.livejournal.com]

*applauds*

Thank you

[gauroth.livejournal.com]

WORD!

As an Anglican I despair of the unchristian way some people bring my church into disrepute. We are not all bigots, honest! The entire debate was revolting. Thank you for expressing my own inchoate thoughts so eloquently.

Also - men? Apart from contributing to the making of a child, we don't actually need them. (I speak as a happily-married het mother.) I suspect that is the core of the argument against this, and other similar bills.

/lurking now.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Go for it Roz.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

The comments on PM blog's entry on this subject (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/pm/2007/11/fathers_ivf_lesbians_etc_1.shtml#comments) run largely along the same lines as your post, so you're not alone at least...

[jinxremoving.livejournal.com]

I got to this one and then my brain melted:

How much do men disgust these women, that they would prefer a medical procedure to that of the love of a man?

[galamb-borong.livejournal.com]

Time to start offering hands-free prostate exams!* Manly loving is so much better than an actual medical procedure.

*Results not guaranteed to be accurate. Repeat testing will likely be required.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Oh, jeez. "And by 'love,' I of course mean 'dick.'"

[blahflowers.livejournal.com]

Ever since the age of consent was finally passed the Lords have missed having an opportunity to talk about queer sex, so this was probably the best chance they had.

Hear Hear!

[crazycrone.livejournal.com]

You are so damn articulate!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's crap like this that has given successive governments the support they need to downgrade the power of the Lords. Which is unfortunately a bad thing in the long term.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was thinking that. It's really hard to be in favour of the Lords when you hear this kind of thing. "Let them eat cake!"

[redbird]

Also, I doubt those bigots think any more highly of lesbian couples who find a male friend to provide the necessary genetic material and be a part of the child's life, but not a primary parent. Nor, for that matter, of similar families where the biological father is a third parent, emotionally and in terms of day-to-day involvement, along with the mothers. Perhaps especially the archbishop who is talking about the child's right to a father.

[resolute.livejournal.com]

After all, it is not as if they can stop lesbian couples bringing up children and they have failed to stop lesbian couples adopting children - those ships have sailed and they lost, dammit. So what they are doing is actually picking on lesbian couples who happen to have infertility problems to be spiteful.

My god, that ship has sailed even here in the Midwestern U.S.

Well, mostly. I live in Minnesota, and you know that's a hotbed of social liberalism. Hence my lesbian multiethnic polyamorous agnostic adoptive family.

I love that argument in the last two paragraphs, btw, and shall be linking to it and quoting it.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

What I noticed most was two things: one, the debate always centers on lesbians, never, EVER two men with a surrogate mother. Probably because no matter how much they stress that some genetic material must come from men, these people don't really believe in DNA.

The second thing was that the equation was always, ALWAYS lesbian couple = children raised by single parent. Now, the law's aim is precisely to formalize the existence of a second parent. The idea is one gender = one person. I find it inexpressably weird. Also, this is horribly demeaning to men. It's not them as a person that they advocate. It's them as a dick, unfortunately coming with a person attached. But the dick is what counts. Children mysteriously sense the presence of the dick, even if it is away at the father's workplace with the father most of them time owing to dick-owners not having a right to maternity leave, and suffer from it. So it's not the physical presence of a loving human being they advocate, it's the *symbolic* presence of a dick.

One sort of wishes to see one of the Peers of the Realm make the argument with a straight face that this conundrum could be resolved with the help of a strap-on, but one is naughty. Besides, one doesn't want any more Peers collapsing in the chamber from shock and outrage.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

You know, there's a minor, but relevant assumption going on here that always bothers the shit out of me, and it's this: have these people met the results of heterosexual homes? Why are they so fixated on this fantasy of some Ideal Father? I cannot count the number of people I know whose fathers are utter scum, to say nothing of those whose fathers are just, on balance, jerks. What is this magical "fathers are always wonderful, how can any child be expected to reach maturity without one" thinking?

[sfmarty.livejournal.com]

I raised a boy with the help of my mother. Two women. He is a great person. Didn't warp him at all to have no men in his house. At least I don't think it did. Btw, he is married to your friend in SF, Deb.

The subtle (and not so) homophobia really gets to me. I was watching a program about Windsor Castle and the new shop they put in. They were having a terrible time selecting a logo. This St. George was too androgenous, etc.

Every damn code word they could think of. They finally found a statue with a huge cock that they deemed suitable. Very masculine.

Fegh.

[parallelgirl.livejournal.com]

Amen.
*applause*

[calimac.livejournal.com]

What gets me is that some of the same people who insist that a child MUST have a (male) father and is somehow crippled by being raised without one - these people are busy sending fathers (and mothers), often of very young children who most need that care, off to spend lengthy (months, years) tours of duty fighting in Iraq, to the obvious detriment of the raising of their children - and that's even leaving aside the large possibility that they will die there.

Nobody to whom these professed "family values" actually meant anything would countenance such a thing; indeed, in past wars relying on a draft, having children was a major factor in deferments.

[(Anonymous)]

Ironically, I think John Sentamu is merely repeating the party line on this - none of the Lords protesting the removal of the phrase "the child's need for a father" are protesting the part of new legislation that says the civil partner of a woman who receives fertility treatment will be the other legal parent of the child, just as the husband is now under the same circumstances.

Sentamu has in the past said he opposes homophobia in the Church of England; I suspect that when he rolls out the party line on "the child's need for a father" he is not seriously opposing it (if he were, he would need to oppose equality for civil partners) nor seriously meaning it. Merely, he and his co-religionists feel they have to be heard spouting the usual stuff, because their homophobic supporters need to hear it, while LGBT people are so used to being kicked by Christians that what do a few more blows matter? (I'm guessing, but Sentamu doesn't strike me as a stupid man, and it is stupid to only attack that one phrase's removal if he were seriously opposed to same-sex couples becoming parents.)

Jesurgislac