Date: Sat, 13 Jan 1996 10:21:12 -0600 From: "Richard D. Mohr" Kids -- What a Concept by Richard D. Mohr I was getting through the annual heterosexual Triple Crown -- Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years -- in chipper spirits. Then I got a press release from Lambda Legal Defense which announced a win in a lesbian adoption case with the gushing claim that adoption is "the most precious victory the law can convey" to a gay person. My soul had a diabetic's reaction to the treacle of "most precious" as applied to having children. Somehow Lambda had managed to ke an important gay legal victory and convert it into a vehicle to sideline the inherent value of me, booting me out of the circle of the precious, the sacred. What an unChristian, illiberal thing to do. As my psychic insulin injection, I reminded myself of the famous Barbara Kruger-inspired postcard of a horror-stricken middle-aged woman, mouth agape, captioned "I Forgot To Have Children!" It is fine for gay folk to sire, bear, and adopt children. Gays should be able to do so by right. But let us not gussy up parenting in false moral finery. People have children either because they are living out a social mandate or because they simply want to have them. To act for the former reason is to cast oneself in the role of a pawn and for the latter simply to act out of old-fashioned self-interest. There is nothing here worthy of moral applause. Indeed there is much that is morally troublesome. To presume that having kids is the most precious thing one can do is uncritically to buy into the ideology which gay columnist Paul Varnell has aptly dubbed "Natalism" and described as the view that "having babies is a good thing, even a wonderful thing; having babies should be encouraged; that marriage finds its primary justification in the production and training of children; that Nature has implanted in humans a desire to procreate;" that the production of children resides among the most important societal goals, perhaps _is_ the most important societal goal, so that anything that departs from this goal is socially destructive, indeed an act of treason. It goes almost without saying that same-sex love and sexuality do not fare well on this reading of society's central norms. Indeed this ideology is exactly the one that spawns and feeds the stereotype of the gay person as child molester, sex crazed predator, and destroyer of civilization. The equation of the gay person and the social traitor is forged by assuming that the sexual dissident corrupts society's central value: gays don't have babies, they destroy them. Remember Anita Bryant's slogan for Save Our Children: "gays don't reproduce, they recruit" -- which is to say, gays make it so that babies won't have babies. It is not simply that gays fall outside the grace of Natalism, gays throw other people's babies outside that grace as well. Gay parents may claim in self-defense that far from buying into Natalism, they undercut this ideology by showing that same- sexers, through slight adjustments made upon Nature, can have kids too -- produce the precious. They show, that is, that gays can make, rather than destroy, babies. Gay parents hold that they are at least as opposed to pedophiles as the next guy is. And for good measure, gay parents also usually claim they don't ven make their own children gay -- who'd want that. But this paired strategy of arrogating goodness to oneself while damning what the majority damns fails to take into account how stereotypes work. Precisely because stereotypes issue from a society's ideology -- the system of beliefs by which it identifies itself to itself and whose maintenance constitutes the life of the society -- stereotypes are not merely false beliefs about what the facts are, something that could be easily fixed through empirical inquiry, random sampling, and the like. Rather stereotypes exist prior to the facts; they serve as lenses which determine what we take as fact, evidence, and good argument. No number of scientific studies finding that gays aren't child molesters and that gay parents don't make gay kids will disturb the socially held belief that gays are child molesters, corruptors of innocence. Rather judges, despite such evidence, regularly remove children from gay parents, even lesbian parents, on the ground that the parent is likely to molest his or her own child: so strong is the stereotype, so strong the belief that gay sexuality is totally out of control, that it dictates that gay sexual drive will even override society's most durable taboo, the one against incest. A gay and lesbian babyboom then will do little or nothing to overcome the stereotype of gay person as child molester. Indeed in its current reconsecration of Natalism, the boom actually fuels the stereotype, all the more so when it advances the myth of childhood preciousness, innocence, and purity. This myth has the double effect of sexualizing children even as it robs them of human agency. Children are as much smelly, violent, cruel things as they are anything else. We romanticize them at our peril -- and theirs. What is to be done? Having called the pedophile as monster into existence, society will have to engage this existence, come to an understanding of what insidious roles in its ideology 'the child molester' plays, and explore what ought to be changed in that ideology. This project will also require rethinking the roles which 'the child' plays in our ideology. How this all comes out cannot be predicted in advance. But it should be remembered that we are not stuck with current models. In classical Athens, sex between adult males and prepubescent youths was illegal, but it was generally acknowledged that virtually every male would want to have sex with children if the opportunity presented itself (see, for example, Plato's discussion of your typical business man as pedophile, _Republic_ 554c-d). The pedophile was not culturally viewed as a pervert, deviant, monster. Everyone was he. What is certain now is that as long as the current ideological construct of the pedophile remains entrenched in society, gay liberation will be impossible.