Bigotry That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Take a look at this hateful screed. Most of the arguments one encounters against civil rights for gay people fall into one of two categories: 1) overt denunciation of homosexuality and homosexuals; and 2) some sort of "proof" that equal rights for gays will be the downfall of society in x, y, and z ways. I tend to think that the latter is a sublimated version of the former.

But it's rare, and in a way, refreshing, to read an attempt to straddle both positions, to simultaneously dehumanize fellow citizens as well as claim that their integration into pre-existing social structures will destroy society. A fisking, then:

"My daddy's name is Donor." [A photograph shows a young boy wearing a shirt with that caption.] This T-shirt made by Family Evolutions, a company that specializes in products for homosexual parents, really says it all. The child is the son of the company's founders, a lesbian pair.

Look at this boy, and look at his T-shirt (click on it for a larger view). That's what the homosexual-marriage campaign is about.

Really? That's what it's all about? So all those gay people who claim that they want to be able to have their love recognized in civil (and secular!) law, and to be able to refer to their loved one as "husband" or "wife," rather than the infantilizing "girlfriend/boyfriend" or bloodless neologism, "partner," are just lying? All that they actually want is to dress little children in slogans that offend traditional cultural sensitivities, or maybe all that they actually want is to create children out of test tubes. Surely it has nothing to do with love, or equal protection under law. Dawn has got some explaining to do, furthermore, when it comes to her views about children conceived through advanced fertilization technologies. Are children born to loving heterosexual parents under these circumstances somehow inferior to other children? If an infertile man and his wife go to a sperm bank in order to have a child, is that child's father's name "donor"? No! It's just "dad," and it refers to the father who raises the child. Something tells me Dawn wouldn't be so quick to express this sort of disdain for the children of heterosexual parents. So her claim amounts to a claim that homosexuals, and not their children, are deficient. Let's read on.

It's not about letting a new social norm be accepted alongside the old. It's about upending the norms, so that instead of a mother and father, a child simply has Parent A and Parent B. It's about making fatherless or motherless children the rule?and not the exception.

In reality, the movement for gay marriage rights has nothing to do with enforcing the coexistence of a new social "norm" [Dawn really needs to learn what normativity means, but I'll give her lazy vocabulary a pass for now] with an old one---that would be the outcome of the codification of civil unions or domestic partnership arrangements. It's not about upending social conventions either. On the contrary, the movement for gay marriage rights is a movement to normalize gay relationships, to bring them within the sphere of "normal" domestic life from which they have so far been excluded. Then comes the innuendo: gays are furtively trying to rob children of their mothers and fathers, just so that their twisted social experiment can succeed. Note that a child who is raised by two men or two women has Parent A and Parent B, not dad and dad, or mom and mom, let alone individuals with their own identities, life experiences, and love for their children. Would Dawn make the same claim about single moms or dads? Do their kids have just Parent A? As for the final clause---about making something the rule rather than the exception---does even Dawn buy this? Homosexuals constitute somewhere between a 20th and a 10th of the population. They will never be the majority---unless, as the more articulate advocates of homosexual civil rights understand, the purpose of the movement is to erase the need for a distinction between gay and straight, and let simple love be the token of a family.

Most of all, the homosexual-marriage campaign is about the selfish interests of adults?not what's best for children. Look at the face of that little boy. He's old enough to have some idea of what it means to have a daddy named Donor. Do you think he's happy about it? Do you think he considers that worth celebrating? Or did his lesbian parents stick him in that T-shirt because they thought they'd have some harmless fun at his expense? Besides, he makes such an adorable shill.

Ah of course, the old trope about selfishness at the heart of homosexual relationships. If we were talking about heterosexuals, it would be manifestly obvious that the desire to have a spouse and a child no matter what the difficulties in obtaining necessary fertilization treatments is anything but selfish. But since we're talking about gays, it must be that they are creating a test tube baby merely to exploit for their own selfish and (naturally) perverse ends. Again, would Dawn feel the same way about the child of a man and woman who was conceived through anonymous artificial insemination because his or her father was infertile? And, one must finally ask, how exactly can she justify imputing a covert agenda of God-only-knows-what-depravities to all homosexuals based on the apparently coarse actions of two individual lesbians? The answer, of course, is that such an argument is only compelling to a paranoiac already convinced that the Homintern is trying to subvert society.
Finally, the jewel of the piece:

The Family Evolutions Web site includes an advice column, "Ask Evolved Moms, which currently has a question from a lesbian mother-to-be, asking if she should circumcise her son. She writes, "To me the penis has never exactly been a beautiful thing regardless of which way it looks - so what do we do?"

If you're a man who grew up with a father, you must be thanking God right now. Clearly, there's more going on in that lesbian's question than simple lack of knowledge. Underneath it is a sense that the child isn't really her child?it's this strange creature that's being dropped in her lap.

I can't think of a heterosexual mother of a son, whether biological or adoptive, who doesn't love her child's body simply because it's his. To think of women who have such a visceral distaste for the male body, not to mention a weird lack of maternal feeling, raising sons on their own?it would be ludicrous if it weren't a very real tragedy.

Ah, of course, I was forgetting that lesbians hate men. And I, as a man, am certainly shocked to learn that there are women who don't think penises are beautiful. For a woman not to love the penis...why that's just downright un-American. Somehow I don't think that confusion over whether or not to circumcise their son disqualifies lesbians as parents. They only have two choices. And neither one is wrong. It's hard to get worked up about something as farcical as this logorrhea eventually becomes; but we have to remember, Dawn actually means every word of it, she really thinks gay people are inferior in fundamental ways, unfit to be parents, undeserving of the full array of civil rights guaranteed to all other citizens, and yet (this is two-fer that characterized traditional anti-semitism) engaged in a cunning and successful plot to undermine the society in which they live. Of course, unlike Jews, it's not quite so easy to treat gays as if they're an alien force. Even Republicans have gay family members. You'd think they'd be a little more compassionately conservative.

Footnote: I think we dealt with the idiocy underlying "think of the children" arguments here.