I’m serious, I will cut that bitch.
I’m not an emotional person (see #5), and in general, things don’t get to me. But I lost it when Andrew Sullivan linked to a National Review post by Heather MacDonald on gay marriage, which bemoaned the “institutionalized severing of biology from parenthood”:
Orphans and abandoned children are raised by non-biological adoptive parents… But these arrangements were considered outliers to the normal practice of conceiving and raising children, forced on the parties by sad necessity.
As most people reading this know, I’m adopted (see #4), and although I’ve had a sometimes-contentious relationship with my parents, they are two of the most caring and devoted people I know. Their faith was one of the major reasons they wanted to adopt, and they would be devastated if someone told them their act of love a “second-best solution.” MacDonald’s dismissal of loving parents because they don’t conform to her vision of a “traditional family” is one of the most despicable, hurtful things I’ve ever read–and it’s worse because I’m sure she thinks she’s being perfectly reasonable.
In my last post, I wrote that to modern-day conservatives, “Outliers are to be homogenized or destroyed.” I think I need to go farther and put the stamp on it: conservatives see nothing wrong with denying outliers and nonconformists their very humanity in the name of getting their way.
It goes without saying that the rest of her post is pure drivel, so full of half-baked claims not even worth addressing that I hesitated to link it. And of course, any self-respecting conservative commentator needs an astounding lack of self-awareness (bold mine):
The facile libertarian argument that gay marriage is a trivial matter that affects only the parties involved is astoundingly blind to the complexity of human institutions and to the web of sometimes imperceptible meanings and practices that compose them.
Heather MacDonald, go fuck yourself with a pineapple, and pray to your god that I never see you on the street.
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Categories: culture, personal, politics
Tags: culture, personal, politics
Comments: 2 Comments.
Ick. Ick ick ick. It would be worse if it wasn’t the fucking National Review, and if her argument was any more substantial than “this is what people think, so it must be right.” But then again preservation of the status quo is really what conservativism is all about, isn’t it?
What scares me is how the ‘birth parents first’ attitude wraps around the political spectrum. I see it quite a bit in feminist circles (i’ve been thinking about this in particular recently), either in terms of the effect on birth mothers or, for international adoptees, cultural issues. You hear quite a few people in womens’ rights tout the strength of the maternal bond between biological parent and child, which isn’t any different from what MacDonald proposes. Ever since lifers started promoting adoption as the alternative to abortion, i’ve seen those on the pro-choice side tear into adoption for the sake of opposition. In terms of culture, saying an adoptee is better off with their ‘racial’ culture, whatever the hell that means, is pretty much identical to ’stick with your own kind’ arguments.
In any case, i’d argue that arguments from either the right or left have no personal quarrel with adoption. It’s just that adoption just so happens to interfere with a political agenda, whether it’s gay marriage or anti-imperialism or whatever. Adoptees get thrown under the bus just so any idiot with a soapbox can make a point. That’s what i think’s the worst: we’re just collateral damage. We don’t fucking matter to them.
