The announcement by Tom Daley and husband Dustin Lance Black that they are ‘expecting’ ‘their’ baby caused a bit of controversy.
Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail stuck his head above the parapet to say no they weren’t, and in the ensuing ‘anti-hate’ hatefest a number of advertisers succumbed to the misnamed Stop Funding Hate campaign to defund the Mail. Douglas Murray in the Spectator was among the few in the mainstream press to come to Littlejohn’s defence. Like Kathy on this site, he did the daring thing and actually articulated some of the ethical questions that arise when two men announce they are ‘having a baby’: Where is the mother? What is her relationship to the baby she is carrying, and how will she feel about handing it over? Is surrogacy ethically sound – how does it differ from buying and selling babies? Is it in a child’s best interests to be brought up without any mother at all, let alone its own? Doesn’t a child have some pre-existing right to be brought up by its biological parents wherever possible – isn’t genetic identity important? What about all the evidence that children bought up by their own married mother and father do best? Basically, can we stop all the lying?
How much longer, I wonder, will people be willing to risk their reputations and endure the social opprobrium and financial penalties of speaking out? How long will it even remain legal?
Such questions are more often than not swept aside by the tide of postmodern ideas of sexuality and identity. Traditional notions of morality and religion have been all but abandoned up against a multi-faceted counterculture of permissiveness, sexual liberation and social deconstruction.
Same-sex marriage, far from being the final victory of equality, now seems to be but the beginning of the push to undermine all social and legal distinctions between men and women and the married and unmarried state. No stone is to be left unturned.
Starting with standardised sex and relationships education in schools in England and Wales – inexplicably backed by mainstream churches, even though it is about as likely to promote traditional Christian marriage over sexual experimentation and ‘alternative lifestyles’ as Tom Daley is to grow a uterus – the endgame appears to be to eliminate from society any idea that there is something different, something odd, about same-sex relationships.
Even the Office of National Statistics fell into line recently with its attempt to stop collecting data on same-sex marriage separately – though it has now backed down under public pressure.
The MSM and BBC are fully aboard the change express. They reported Tom and Dustin’s baby as though it was actually theirs, without even a hint that there was anything that needed explaining.
The aim appears to be to expunge from our antiquated minds the oppressive idea that there is anything uniquely meaningful and special when a man and a woman commit to one another for life to bring children into the world, to construct a social reality in which biology is overridden by novel ideas centred on the self-constructed ‘authentic’ individual, and to ban all other views lest they offend this delicate flower and threaten its self-expression and development.
Instead of being taught about what it means to be a man and a woman, the facts about fertility, the importance of being and staying married, the joys of having a family for the sake of their own and their children’s happiness and welfare, young people are fed a diet of lies and distortions about how anything goes as long as it feels right and you have obtained from the other person some vague indefinable thing called ‘consent’. The chances of their being taught about the downsides and dangers of homosexual sex – for example, that at least one in seven sexually active gay men in London has HIV – are minimal.
Double standards and inconsistency when it comes to sex education are second to none. Public – and mental – health goes out of the window.
This is no way to ‘safeguard’ the new generation. How are young people raised on a diet of sexual permissiveness supposed to be protected from sexual predators when all boundaries are blurred, to the extent that a judge took the side of a teacher over the pupil he slept with?
Is ‘consent’ meant to be the answer to all that?
To add to their confusion, young people are now being made to accept the idea that they can be in the ‘wrong body’ and that they can choose their gender identity. Alongside increasingly coercive attempts to make everyone accept confused men in dresses as women, there are equally coercive attempt to stop people from getting the help they seek in dealing with feelings of same-sex attraction they would rather not have. A concerted push to ban all forms of ‘gay cure’ therapy – even though many people seek counselling in this area – is under way.
It is high time for conservatives to recover their backbone and push back against this bullying, to take a stand against the whole corrosive LGBT agenda which is undermining the married family, to take back parental control of children’s education, and insist on the precious rights of conscience and free expression. It is time for conservatives to start talking about what we really want, rather than gratefully accepting any meagre crumb off the table of what we hope our progressive masters might be willing to concede to us.
