Lies, legs and liasons

One of the troubling trends which seems to be at work in the world, the First World anyway, but perhaps it is universal, is the tendency to seek to deny inconvenient truths which inject levels of reality into belief systems.

We can of course deny inconvenient truths but is that wise, healthy or responsible for our children?

As an example, a couple have a child born without legs, or perhaps with one leg. Would it be healthy for them to deny that human beings are generally born with two legs and being without one or both, is more challenging and will have impacts which those born fully formed will not have?

Should they say to the child: There is no difference between you and the other child with two legs, or, if the deformed child, for deformed it is, receives prostheses so some function is possible, should they say to the child with its artificial legs: There is no difference at all between you and children who have been born with legs?

I don't think so. A wise parent would talk to the child about the challenges brought by the difference and seek to help the child to compensate for the disadvantage and to strive DESPITE the loss of one or both healthy legs which human beings normally possess.

Any parent foolish enough to try to pretend that the legless child was no different to the one with legs, would be seen by their child as dishonest, stupid or both.

And yet that is the position which some, one might argue, too many, take in regard to same-sex marriage, where, despite the biological reality that no human being has ever, can ever or will ever exist without a mother and a father, a male and a female, we are meant to pretend that two males as parents or two females as parents are not at all different to a male and a female as parents, when, patently they are.

I am not talking about how people dress, or cultural expressions of maleness and femaleness, but the innate biological differences between a man and a woman, something no-one born as one gender, can manufacture or manifest as the other.

Two men in a relationship may be loving, responsible and wonderful parents, as may two women in a relationship but the relationship will be between two men or two women and not between the biological norm, a man and a woman and therefore cannot offer the natural parental gender mix. Like it or not, most humans are one gender or the other, male or female, and modern definitions on the theme are more psychological invention than biological reality.

A child denied the reality and truth of one gender parent is being told a lie, akin to that of the legless child, that there is no difference being born with two legs or no legs when of course there is.

No-one disputes the fact that two men or two women can bring up a child well, but if they deny the right of the child to a surrogate gender parent for the one that is missing, or try to pretend that two fathers or two mothers equal a father and a mother, then they are building a relationship on lies and delusion.

And that is why, whatever changes are made to the Marriage Act, it must enshrine the reality that every single one of us has a biological mother and a father in our lives and has a right to those roles in our upbringing. Not only that, we have evolved throughout human evolution being brought up by members of both sexes even if we were not raised by our biological parents, and that gender mix is a crucial part of our mental, emotional and physical health.

It is not the same being born without legs as it is being born with legs and it is not the same being raised by two men or two women as it is being raised by a man and a woman. When we start pretending that it is, for the sake of political correctness, we become fools and liars.