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 Rachel Cook discusses the lesbian agenda.
A heterosexual man drove his car into a dam, drowning his three young boys…
A heterosexual man who abandoned his three year old daughter and is the prime suspect in the murder of his estranged wife has fled the country…
A heterosexual fifteen year old boy was the eldest of three heterosexual boys charged with the gang rape of a thirteen year old girl…
The Prime Minister John Howard, a heterosexual man, has turned away the Tampa, which was carrying four hundred asylum seekers, even though he was advised it was a breach of international law…
George W. Bush, a known heterosexual, and President of the United States, has admitted there were no WMD’s in Iraq nearly two years after ordering the invasion of Iraq because of suspected stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction…
A heterosexual couple is suing doctors after the woman fell pregnant following a failed vasectomy…
The news doesn’t read like this. However, it does read like this:
A lesbian couple is suing a Canberra doctor for mistakenly implanting two embryos instead of one during IVF treatment….
This strange little story has become what it inevitably would always become: evidence that lesbians should not be allowed to have children, at least by IVF.
The case has led to Tasmanian Liberal Senator Guy Barnett calling for lesbian couples and single women to be banned from publicly funded IVF treatments.
“Every child who comes into the world should reasonably expect the care and affection of a mother and father,” he said.
Umm, yeah, we’ve heard this kind of rhetoric before. The relevance it has to this particular case is?
Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt wrote that, “IVF has become a beacon issue for gay rights, with the children too often seeming to be a political statement, rather than the ultimate gift of love -- and ultimate responsibility, too.”
This story is no longer about a medical practitioner’s accountability, and whether the couple have a right to monetary compensation for an unwanted second child: it’s about lesbians being afforded the same rights as heterosexual couples and then daring to bite the hand that feeds.
At last count, on the ninemsn comments website about this story, there were 279 responses. One word in particular stood out: ‘ungrateful’. Some of the respondents used the word in relation to the couple’s seeming lack of appreciation of the gift of their second child. Others used the word to convey their dismay that the couple could be so selfish to not recognise, as lesbians, how lucky they are to be allowed access to IVF treatment.
The media’s use of the word lesbian is loaded, just as using the word heterosexual would be loaded if every child abuse story described the perpetrator’s sexuality. Given that over seventy per cent of child sexual abuse cases are committed by heterosexual fathers, would the public outcry be that straight men should not be allowed to have children if we were constantly reminded of this fact? As it stands, the only time we hear of a pedophile’s sexuality is if his victim was a boy.
Could this story have ever avoided the political debate it has now become over whether lesbians should have access to IVF? Probably not. Whether the media referred to them as a lesbian couple or not, the story was always going to reveal the sexuality of the women, which was always going to be problematic for some people.
But let’s play fair: if it is appropriate to spell out the sexuality of some, let’s spell it out for all. The bad news stories would be so filled with the word ‘heterosexual’ that we might finally get a truer perspective.
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