Posted on 08/25/2010 5:52:33 AM PDT by Kaslin
Next year’s Academy Awards program ought to have a new category: Best Portrayal of a Sperm Donor. At least, that’s the role that’s being cast with increasing — and alarming — frequency.
First came the cinematic summer hit "The Kids Are All Right," the story of a lesbian couple that each have given birth to a child using sperm from the same donor. Reaching their teen years, the children want to meet their biological father (whom the moms only call “sperm donor”). The kids track him down and some predictable family drama ensues, including a romantic tryst between donor-dad and one of the women (Oops! Make that “womyn”). But in the end, it’s affirmed that this nontraditional family is simply A-OK.
The film is art imitating life, as it was written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko, who, with sperm from a donor, gave birth to the child she is raising with her partner, musician Wendy Melvoin.
Next, while promoting her movie "The Switch," actress Jennifer Aniston trumpeted the benefits of deliberate single motherhood via sperm donors. Elaborating on the movie’s premise — a single 40-year-old woman gives up on romance and marches into motherhood on her own — Ms. Aniston said, "Women are realizing…they don't have to settle with a man just to have that child…Times have changed…Love is love and family is what is around you."
Now come TV actor Neil Patrick Harris and his partner David Burtka, who last week announced they are “expecting twins” via a surrogate mother and anticipate the arrival of a son and a daughter in October.
Progressives in Hollywood aggressively advance the notion that all relationships are equally valuable and beneficial for children, as long as they’re grounded in love. This is a big issue in the gay marriage debate — the idea that it’s not the gender of a couple, but the quality of their relationship, that matters.
Or as Ms. Aniston put it, “family is what is around you.”
That may be a pleasant (if not insipid) sentiment, but statistical analyses about what is best for children prove the ignorance of such an assumption.
Every conceivable aspect of childhood — from emotional health to cognitive development, social success to educational attainment — any variable you can measure, even when controlling for socioeconomic status, indicates that children in conventional two-parent homes with a mother and father are better off than their peers from “non-traditional” families.
Times may have changed for some, who more readily accept the family variations that increasingly are called “normal” in American culture. But times have not changed for children. To deliberately create a family structure based on the myth that “a parent is a parent” can only be labeled selfish, since it’s the needs and desires of the adults, not the children, which are pursued.
Men and women are not interchangeable (as Ms. Cholodenko and Ms. Melvoin, and Mr. Harris and Mr. Burtka would doubtless agree), and neither are mothers and fathers. Each plays a unique and vital role in the development of a whole person, which is why children always want and need both a mom and a dad.
Our culture already battles the far-reaching implications of nearly 40 percent births out of wedlock. Now the rich and famous are promoting a new kind of abandonment: motherless and fatherless children of gay couples.
It may be the rage in Hollywood, but it’s not “normal.” It’s not healthy. It’s not good for children. And as we’ll see in due time, it’s not good for the culture.
No, no, dear, you missed the memo. To say that adults shouldn't have exactly what they want, if they can pay for it, makes you judgmental, self-righteous, and one step away from the Taliban.
Amen.
If God had wanted two women or two men to be parents, He would have given them the means to reproduce.
That just makes my skin crawl.
If we stop going to or buying movies, movie magazines, going to concerts, plays, buying CDs, etc., we take money away from them that allows them to shove this stuff in our face.
THEY have already turned their backs on conservatives and treated us like house slaves, it's past time for US to stop funding their perversion. This won't happen overnight but, if we really want to end Sodom and Gomorrah in America, this is where we start.
I think I'll start praying for the mother to change her mind. We've seen THAT court case before.
110% right!
It is the height of selfish to demand that you be allowed to ruin an innocent life with whatever your perverted ideas are.
Way too many “conservatives” want to say “Whats the big deal?” It IS a big deal. If it was a viable lifestyle, would it not have already been tried in the past?
Remember when the media railed on Quail for his Murphy Brown comments?
He was right then, and it’s still right now.
Wonder what ever happened to him?
Agree. I change the channel whenever he is on.
I watched “The Switch” with Anniston and Jason Bateman...the sperm donation premise was there but the movie ended very well.
If it was a viable lifestyle, it would have been *successful* in the past. There have always been sexual perversions, just as there have always been other mental illnesses. However, the idea that this forms a successful model for society and its future is a novelty.
I think one reason some conservatives find this acceptable is simply materialism: they think that if the *parents* of whatever kind have money, that’s all the children need. However, one need only pick up “People” magazine in the Walmart to see the empirical disproof of that premise.
What kind of woman would do this? Please pray for the children.
Another case of the madcap, makeshift, miniscule morality brought upon us by perverse reproductive technology, and it would have been just as perverted if they were straight: that is, with or without the thrown-in "gay" factor.
Neither the man nor the woman here really respects the child. Because if they did, the first thing they would have done would be to protect the child' right to derive identity, care and provision from both of his parents: and that means, they would have gotten married.
This is the parents' first obligation to their future child: recognize him as a person with a deep need for secure attachment to his father and mother.
There is no right to rip off half a child's parentage, no more than to cave-in half the ground under his feet, or rip down half the sky.
Very well put.
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