Universalis, About this blog

Showing posts with label homosexuality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homosexuality. Show all posts

Thursday, October 09, 2008

IVF bill for gay and lesbian parents passes the Lower House

Ever get that feeling that we're getting hit from multiple angles? So while many are on the phone and email (among others) to their MPs concerning the Abortion Law Reform bill, this IVF bill has zoomed past. It still has the Upper House to hurdle, however, and I hope those who are concerned can muster the time to voice concerns to the Legislative Council about this one, too. Both bills are fraught with problems, e.g., lack of data, foresight, appreciation for the big picture, etc.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Trapped in the wrong body, or the wrong mindset?

Hats off to Uncle Di, who exposes the forces of political agendas against (gasp) Natural Law.

This is vile even by progressivist standards. German quacks started pumping a 12-year-old boy, now 14, full of female hormones so as to make him "the world's youngest transsexual." For legal reasons, castration and other surgical mutilation must be delayed until "Kim," born Tim, turns 18.

According to the Telegraph article:

Tim was diagnosed as a transsexual two years ago, when doctors and psychiatrists concluded that his claims to be "in the wrong body" were so deeply felt that he required treatment. The therapy involves artificially arresting male puberty, with a series of potent hormone injections before the administration of female hormones to initiate the development of features such as breasts.

Says Uncle Di:

Progressivist intellectuals such as deans and editors and high court judges see the indefensible puerility of a phrase like "trapped in the wrong body" as clearly as we do. But they tolerate it -- and, at need, defend the mutilation it purports to justify -- as the price of deflecting the force of Natural Law reasoning, which, if permitted to direct their deliberation and choice, would mean they'd have to forfeit altogether the project of protean sexuality (self-created, free-form, non-judgmental sexual liberty) which is the keystone of their public philosophy. Such a forfeiture is unthinkable. Sooner than put that project at risk, they're willing to put up with incoherence and cruelty.

The political alliance between abortion rights and gay rights absolutists bears this out. Gays claim that unitary human nature is a fiction and that the individual has absolute dominion over his own trajectory. Why? Because it allows them total liberty of sexual indulgence. Abortion partisans claim that a woman has absolute dominion over her own body. Why? Because it allows them total liberty of sexual indulgence as well as the liberty to disencumber themselves of the undesired consequences of that indulgence. Robert Bork points out that an absolute right over one's body was not recognized by law (the law didn't permit a surgeon, he says, to amputate a man's healthy arm even if he asks him to -- say, to settle a bet), but there's no question today that judges will pretend it's absolute wherever the project of moral self-determination -- what Scalia calls "the sweet mystery of life" jurisprudence -- is imperilled.

The excision of a healthy baby, like that of a healthy limb, is of a piece with the decision to addle a 12-year-old boy with estrogen on the basis of the politically expedient imbecillity that he's "trapped" in the wrong body. It has nothing to do with physiology and everything to do with Elton John's habits of oral hygiene -- which habits the Western élites have made the touchstone of public thought about civil order. If a few innocent Tims get Kim'd in the process -- well folks, we've already put orphans out to ranch in gay households and ash-canned tens of millions of unborn babies as surgical waste. It's the price of progress.