Posted on 08/28/2009 4:16:40 AM PDT by Rummyfan
Weve never had more personal sexual liberty. And less freedom of almost every other kind.
The other day CTV reported the astonishing statistic that in the whole of Canada there are just 33 sperm donors. That seems awfully low for a nation of 30 million people. Three sperm donors per province plus one per territory? Surely we can do better than that. All hands on deck!
Ah, but its not as simple as that. Apparently, the 2004 Assisted Human Reproduction Act makes it illegal to pay donors for sperm. I mean, it wasnt even the usual Canadian Wheat Board-type racket whereby youd only be able to sell your seed to the Canadian Sperm Board at a price agreed upon by representatives of the federal-provincial Semen Commissions. Instead, they just nixed the whole deal, and, once Johnny Canuck found out he wasnt going to be remunerated, virtually the entire supply dried up.
As a result, this once proud Dominion now has to import sperm. According to CTV, 80 per cent of Canadian women who conceive through donor sperm are getting it from the United States, mainly from men in Georgia and northern Florida. Canadas future is now in American hands.
You know how it is: you wait ages for a good sperm story and then they all come at once. It seems theres also a shortage of the stuff in Sweden. But, in contrast to Canada, this is caused not by government intervention in supply but by a surge in demand, from Swedish lesbian couples anxious to conceive. Inga and Britta had been trying for a child for ages but nothing seemed to work. Then it occurred to them this might be because theyre both women. So they headed off to the sperm clinic, whereupon the Sapphic demand ran into the problem of male inability to satisfy it. There appear to be higher than usual levels of non-functioning sperm.
Dont worry, Im not being Swedophobic in mocking the watery emissions of Nordic manhood. Its a widespread problem: Concern As Sperm Count Falls By A Third In UK Men (the Daily Mail, 2004). Dont ask me why: Id blame Tony Blairs cozying up to Bush were it not for Sperm Count Drops 25 Per Cent In Younger Men (the Independent, 1996), so maybe it was John Major pulling out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Still, even for a demographic doom-monger such as myself, you could hardly ask for a more poignant fin de civilisation image than a stampede of broody lesbians stymied only by defective semen, like some strange dystopian collaboration between Robert Heinlein and Russ Meyer set in a world divided into muff divers and duff donors.
I wouldnt want to overly extrapolate from two minor news items, and Id be quite happy to do cheap lesbo-seminal gags to the foot of the page, but the thought does occur that a visitor from the day before yesterdaysay, the mid-20th centurywould be befuddled by the problems we face in the dawn of the new millennium. The other day the Toronto Star, ever on the cutting edge in the hunt for new bigotries, turned in a fascinating report on the problems of air travel and . . . Go on, take a wild guess. Racial profiling? Ha! You piker! Were talking about gender profilingin the sense that most of these squaresville Homeland Security types think there are men and there are women and thats pretty much it. As a result, many pre-operative transsexuals run into difficulties south of the border or when flying trans Atlantically, and thats before the introduction of Whole Body Imaging scanners where you may show up naked on the security screen packing a few too many extras. Travelling for transpeople is always fraught with uncertainty, Ontario lawyer Nicole Nussbaum told the Star. The current system doesnt match up with transpeoples lives.
Of course, no system could. I see that what I quaintly thought of as the Toronto Gay Pride Parade was officially billed this year as a parade to celebrate the LGBTTIQQ2S communities.
LGBTTIQQ2S? Oh, come on. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Transgendered, Intersexual, Queer, Questioning and 2-Spirited. Where ya bin? 2-Spirited doesnt mean too spirited, as in Anne of Green Gables, but is supposedly some First Nations thing. Anyway, you can see why the current system of airport security has a hard time keeping up. Any day now, theyll introduce Intergendered and Transspirited, and by the time Mayor Miller has stumbled through the acronym in his official proclamation, the paradell be over. So, when a Bigendering person shows up at the frontier, dont be surprised if the border guard comes over all 2-Questioning. Travel, explains the Stars Julia Steinecke, is complicated for those who live in the grey area between genders.
Indeed. Flying is no place for those who live in the grey area. Everythings black and white: Business or coach? Chicken or beef? If you dont fit into a gender box, says award-winning Canadian writer Ivan E Coyote, all of a sudden, youre a target. Mr./Ms. Coyote prefers to be addressed as he/she and self-identifies as a very masculine reading estrogen-based organism. And the hicks at U.S. Customs and Border Protection dont have a check box for that. Mr./Ms. Coyote was recently detained at Ottawa Airport along with a friend whod flown in from America, a tall, feminine woman with a heavy moustache.
Well, thats her choice. His choice. Whatever. A few years ago, Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics wrote that ours is the age of the new Epicureans in which the freedom to choose trumps all. A childless couple can choose to conceive. A female couple can choose to conceive. A male coupleBarrie and Tony from Chelmsford, Englandcan choose to conceive and both be registered as the biological fathers of their children not so much on the technical grounds that they had co-mingled their sperm before shipping it out to their Fallopian time-share in California but out of a more basic sympathy that this is how Barrie and Tony self-identify and it would be cruel to deny them. A woman in Bend, Ore., can choose to become a man, and then a pregnant man. A man can choose to become a woman. A man can choose to get halfway to becoming a woman, and then decide its more fun to live in the grey area. Biologically, Barrie or Tony, but not both, is the sole father of their child; the pregnant man is pregnant but not a man; the he/she living in the grey area is in reality black or whiteat least according to what we used to call the facts of life. But issuers of passports, drivers licences, even birth certificates and no doubt one day U.S. Department of Homeland Security visas now defer to the principle of self-identification.
In terms of sexual identity, were freer than almost any society in human history, at least in terms of official validation of our choice to redefine ourselves in defiance of biological and physiological reality. And yet, if you accept that infertile couples and gay couples should be free to have babies by means of technology, why should you not be free to sell them the semen that enables them to do it? If you suggest that, say, partial-birth abortion (which is actually partial-birth infanticide) ought to be illegal, feminists will be out in the street chanting, Keep your laws off my body! and Keep your rosaries off my ovaries! But, when the government tells you you cant sell your own bodily fluid, which is, after all, about as basic a personal property as anything, there are no outraged progressives to chant Keep your legislation off my ejaculation!
At some point we will come to see that the developed worlds massive expansion of personal sexual liberty has provided a useful cover for the shrivelling of almost every other kind. Free speech, property rights, economic liberty and the right to self-defence are under continuous assault by Big Government. But who cares when Big Government lets you shag anything that moves and every city in North America hosts a grand parade to celebrate your right to do so? Its an oddly reductive notion of individual liberty. The noisier grow the novelties of our ever more banal individualism, the more the overall societal aesthetic seems drearily homogenizedlike closing time in a karaoke bar with the last sad drunks bellowing off the prompter I did it My Way!
And in the end even the sex doesnt do it. In the Netherlands, the most progressive nation in Europe, the land where whatevers your bag is cool, where naked women beckon from storefront windows, a certain ennui is palpable. Last week, the ANP news agency released a poll showing that the Dutch now derive more pleasure from going to the bathroom than from sex. It wasnt a close-run thing: eighty per cent identified a trip to the toilet as the activity they enjoy the mostor, as the South African newspaper the Witness put it, The Bogs Better Than Bonking. To modify Eliot, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a flush.
Come on Canucks show your patriotism!
You mean...I could go to Canada and father a whole flock of Perchprisms? Hmmmmm...
Back in the 70’s and 80’s I donated to quite a number of free range sperm banks. And I like hockey...
LGBTTIQQ2S? (LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM) lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, flexual, asexual, genderf**k, polyamourous, bondage/disciple, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism (LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM) http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2326426/posts
Classic Steyn!
Canadas future is now in American hands.
I’ve been thinking for sometime that the only ‘right’s not restricted are sex and abortion.
There must be a huge penalty up there for early withdrawel.
Does the Department of Commerce include exporting sperm in its balance of trade calculations?
.....Still, even for a demographic doom-monger such as myself, you could hardly ask for a more poignant fin de civilisation image than a stampede of broody lesbians stymied only by defective semen, like some strange dystopian collaboration between Robert Heinlein and Russ Meyer set in a world divided into muff divers and duff donors......
A long but fantastic sentence. My best effort on my very best day could not hope to begin to measure up to that collection of words.
Keep your legislation off my ejaculation!
bump
With so few donors, they could end up with brothers and sisters unknowingly marrying.
Steyn is on a roll...
{Son, don’t go near the Indians
Please stay away
Son, don’t go near the Indians
Please do what I say}
Since I was just a little boy
I liked to roam the hills
And to hear wild stories about the Indians
Was my biggest thrill
I’d shout and yell and holler like heck
I wore moccasins on my feet
And I’d make believe I was under a teepee
Every time I went to sleep
My hair was jet black and I was twenty-one
Lots of pretty girls around
But the paleface maidens didn’t thrill me none
Around my Cochise County hometown
{Son, don’t go near the Indians
Please stay away
Son, don’t go near the Indians
Please do what I say}
One day I went to the reservation
And there by a shallow creek
Was a beautiful Indian a-fetchin’ water
And I just had to speak
She smiled at me then quickly left
But the next day she returned
And it wasn’t very long till I told her how
The love in my heart burned
{Son, don’t go near the Indians
Please stay away
Son, don’t go near the Indians
Please do what I say}
I told my daddy I’d found a girl
Who meant the world to me
And tomorrow I’d ask the Indian chief
For the hand of NovaLee
Dad’s trembling lips spoke softly
As he told me of my life
Twas then he said I could never take
This maiden for my wife
SPOKEN:
Son, the white man and Indianss were fighting when you were born
And a brave called Yellow Sun scalped my little boy
So I stole you to get even for what he’d done
Though you’re a full-blooded Indian, son
I love you as much as my own little feller that’s dead
And, son, NovaLee is your sister
And that’s why I’ve always said
SINGING:
{Son, don’t go near the Indians
Please stay away
Son, don’t go near the Indians
Please do what I say}
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.