Monday, September 22, 2008

On N.S.W.’s abolition of parenthood

According to an article in today’s Sydney Daily Telegraph,

LESBIAN parents will be able to have both their names on their child’s birth certificate from today.
As I pointed out some time ago in a comment at the old Coo-ees blog, this development appears to be based on the idea that a mother and a father are not, to borrow the language of microeconomics, perfect complements, as would traditionally be held, but merely perfect substitutes. Hence, for proponents of this madness, a mother and a father are as good as ‘two mums’ or ‘two dads’.

But if this is the case, then why is two the optimum number of ‘co-parents’? It’s a pretty arbitrary number, really, once it’s divorced from conjugal complementarity between spouses and biological connectedness between parents and children. Why must we submit slavishly to such a dreadfully old-fashioned and ‘heteronormative’ model of parenthood? How long will it be before we are called upon, in the noblest traditions of tolerance, to ‘celebrate the diversity’ of three-, four-, five-parent mega-families? How dare we discriminate against the right of bisexuals to take both an husband and a wife?! (Perhaps we will see the pansexuals and the Muslims find some common ground here! One’s enemy’s enemy is one’s friend, after all.) The next logical step after ‘Parent 1, Parent 2’ birth certificates is clearly to have just a blank space headed ‘Parents’. (Obviously, a child with 'two mums' already has three parents, since there must have been a dad somewhere along the line, though I understand that there are scientists working to overcome this little piece of discrimination from homophobic old Mother Nature.)

So what I am trying to argue is that by abolishing motherhood and fatherhood we don’t just eliminate a ‘discriminatory’ model of parenthood (which, as usual, is a move that ignores the fact that there is just discrimination and there is unjust discrimination); in fact, we abolish parenthood itself and replace it with a notion of parents as merely long-term carers. But then, the pansexuals were never too good at teasing out all the implications of their deranged demands all at once. It’s always little by little, bit by bit.

Reginaldvs Canvar

1 comment:

Zoe Brain said...

Obviously, a child with 'two mums' already has three parents, since there must have been a dad somewhere along the line

Not necessarily. One of the mums could be a biological father, in cases of Intersex.

Actually, in extreme cases, only 1 biological parent is needed. But in the only case I know of, as the woman concerned lacked a vaginal opening (amongst other neccessary organs), the foetus died after a few weeks and was encysted in the abdomen. Such things are rare though (1 in a billion?).