House of Eratosthenes

So far the debate has been whether or not the lesbian couple is racist. I will not address that issue because I believe there is something much larger at stake here. I want to instead highlight the legacy that decades of artificial reproductive technologies has left us: a society that sees children as products…

There follows a small sampling of comments defending the lawsuit by the Lesbians against the fertility clinic, that stands accused of having given them the wrong color baby.

Including, but not limited to, the following:

And my personal favorite:

If you order a cheese burger at the drive thru and you end up getting McNuggets,. That doesn’t mean that you hate chicken,it means you ordered a freaking cheese burger!

Structurally, these arguments all take a form of arguments based on sex-preference-neutrality: That the suit should go forward, not because we’re watching an “oppressed victim class” contest between alternate sexual preferences vs. alternate skin color, but because of basic rights enjoyed by all of us dealing with civil protections. It’s all about the contract, in other words.

It’s a dishonest argument, at least it probably is dishonest, because it’s difficult to envision those advancing it displaying the quality of consistency under a different scenario: Straights litigating over the same thing. If course, if they were to continue defending it if that were the case, then it wouldn’t be a gay issue. But common sense says that wouldn’t happen. Happily married, affluent, Romney-voting husband-and-wife, white as copier paper and entrenched deeply in the “one percent” — suing a fertility clinic because they got a black baby? They’d have all these defenders? I’m gonna stick my neck out, and opine that it’s a gay issue.

And if I’m right, then this is not just anti-people but anti-freedom. We’re not enjoying genuine “freedom” unless it applies to everyone; we don’t “take turns,” class by oppressed class, enjoying some time in the limelight as the fashion-wheel slowly turns, “fighting for,” or being “given,” our freedoms. Year by year, we all have them. It’s “actually pretty boring,” as I pointed out in Thing I Know #196.

Also you can put me down as concerned over this other matter, about people being turned into things. As I wrote over six years ago,

And so “comfort” has evolved to a state of being like some model…not achieving something, but resembling something. Being, not doing. Because if people accept you as a peer, you won’t be left to starve no matter what — but if they don’t, then who knows? More guarantees in life are always good. And so we try to be like everybody else.

And this leads to…other problems…
:
Look what we have going on here: The baby itself…is not enough. The baby is incomplete without a bauble coming with it. But is the baby not an representative agent of all of humanity? And so humanity is now reduced to an incomplete thing. Humans are just bagel without the spread, car without the air conditioning, house without swimming pool. We’re incomplete by nature. How can it possibly be suggested otherwise? That’s exactly what our babies are, now…to their very own mothers.

And it’s worth mentioning one more time — this is a severe injury dealt to what, now, is supposed to be our primary achievement. We are failing to be, and to be is supposed to be our primary mission — doing is a trivial matter. You’re hired into a job, you are hired to be and not to do. If you’re fired, you’re fired for your failure to be and not to do. If not — when you get another executive in charge of the company, if you open your company’s web site and read his biography, you’ll probably read a great deal about what he is…not so much anymore about what he has done.

Regrettably, I’ve not been given much reason to change my viewpoint in the years since I wrote that. In fact, in all that time I haven’t heard too much under a broad communication enclave about people doing, really, much of anything at all. I hear about the action-verbs locally: Morgan fixed the fence, the cable company sent us a refund, my wife painted the downstairs bathroom, house alarm people changed our console password, Internet guy installed a new router, the sprinkler guy failed to show up again, etc. But move away from the locality, look at it from a higher level, and no one seems to actually do much of anything anymore; they don’t engage efforts that directly change states of objects. The closest they come to that, has to do with getting someone else’s hands dirty. They run for office, they litigate, they organize communities, they give a lot of speeches. They spread awareness. They “do” things that have to do with changing the opinions inside the skulls of other people, total strangers. That, and introducing some change to the money inside those strangers’ purses and billfolds. Oh, and they choose. I hear a lot of noise about people choosing things, the point of which seems to be to remind me that it’s nobody’s business; which is odd, given that I usually had never asked, nor heard of anyone else asking, and this is one of the very few things I hear about people actually doing anymore.

Hey, anybody making any noise about what that little girl is going to do with her life? We’ve all sure heard a lot about her skin color. But that’s being, not doing.

So, yeah. After umptyfratz-many-years of listening to feminists complain about “women/girls being objectified,” we find out — very late, perhaps far too late — this was a thing after all, but not a woman/girl thing by any means. And appreciating the sight of a nice-looking stripper, or female teevee show character, was not the problem. The problem boils down to, as real problems often do boil down to, one of too much sitting-around and not enough achievement. We’ve become just like spoiled teenagers coming up with excuses for not taking out the garbage.

Here, I’ll prove it. Are we going back to the moon sometime soon? Why or why not? Oh yeah…bigger fish to fry. Not enough time and resources given ALL that other stuff we’re doing. What’s that, exactly? Muslim outreach and so forth.

It’s just like garbage-duty. You hear these excuses about not enough time; the truth is, if the achievement were to happen, it would start with someone doing something that isn’t much fun. And they don’t want to do it.

I cite the moon thing only because it is unique in its contrast against the backdrop of history; humanity is actually retreating, throughout several generations and with no turnaround in sight, from a frontier. It is having a discouraging effect on us all, because it is discouraging by nature. It should be. We weren’t built to be treated the way we’ve been treating ourselves.

Things will get much better as soon as we treat each other like human beings.

I’m honestly surprised that anyone is still surprised that liberals aren’t crying “raciss” at this couple. Hasn’t it been obvious for a couple of decades now that no Designated Victim can be raciss? Liberals can say the most awful things about Condi Rice, Clarence Thomas, etc. and get away with it (“Kos Commenter or Klan Wizard?” is a fun party game). And gays are the most Victim-y Victims of them all — gays like Perez Hilton and Dan Savage routinely say things that even liberals would consider out of bounds coming from anyone else.

That said, the only problem I have with this couple is the one I have with any couple trying to raise a designer baby: children are not lifestyle accessories. They’re not little self-propelled Prada bags. They’re not just slightly more articulate Shih Tzus. They’re not trophies.

Look at this couple’s actual complaints. Oh, it’s so haaaaard to find a place that can cut little Whatzerface’s hair. It makes us uncoooooommmfortable. Yes, the town is perfectly ok with two lesbians in motorcycle boots feeling each other up on public streets, but they draw the line at an interracial baby. Baloney. They’d file the same lawsuit, citing the same complaints, if they’d ordered a miniature poodle from a kennel and got a chihuahua instead. It’s all about THEM.

This is why America is fucked. The constant, preening, all-pervading narcissism. It’s not enough that you’re legally mandated to celebrate our love. No, we’ve got to have a kid. But it’s got to be exactly the right kid, and when little Whatzerface fails her first assignment at school, here come the helicopter couple to get the grade changed, because obviously the teacher just did it to get back at the lesbian parents.

As you say, there’s nothing in all the thousands of words of commentary I’ve seen on this subject to indicate that little Whatzerface — you know, the designer kid — is a human being at all. She’s just a participation trophy in the game of life. And she’ll treat her designer kids exactly the same way, world without end amen.
- Severian | 10/16/2014 @ 07:56

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“She Paid For”Thursday, October 16th, 2014

“She Paid For”
Thursday, October 16th, 2014