Garrison Keillor may be a bleeding-heart liberal but he’s on target in this Salon.com article on self-centered parenting, whether it be gay parents or parents who treat their kids like status symbols or pets (or who treat their pets like one of the kids). The subtitle says it all: “Nature doesn’t care about the emotional well-being of older people. It’s about the continuation of the species — in other words, children.”
That’s the point: Children are no longer appreciated in and of themselves, but only in relation to how they make the adults feel. Witness the older single woman who insists on in vitro fertilization because she wanted to have a career first, but now wants to feel fulfilled by being a mother at her convenience. Husband and father? Feh! She doesn’t need a man for her fulfillment. Never mind that the child might like a dad who’s more than a genetic donor. Monogamous, stable man-woman relationships (since you can’t just say “marriages” nowadays and have everyone understand what you mean) meant that children could be raised in safe environments of emotional and developmental stability, where their own needs were not sacrificed in the name of narcissistic self-actualization.
The gay family
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