There are some points a society gets to on various issues and you think: ‘Yes! This is just right! This bit could stop right here and it would be perfect!’ And then some bright-spark no-mark goes and thinks: ‘I know what – let’s take it a bit further and see what happens…’ The results are invariably rubbish.
‘Anti-racism’ goes from colourblindness to DEI. ‘Equality of the sexes’ becomes lots of simple-minded babble about Strong Women who shout ‘Yas, Kween!’ at random intervals. The labrador and the poodle become the labradoodle, just for the hell of it. (The man who invented the breed has since noted that healthy labradoodles are ‘few and far between’ and most are ‘crazy or have a hereditary problem’.)
Think of reproduction. What could have been a better idea for couples having trouble reproducing than adoption, whereby a child languishing in an orphanage would be chosen by an infertile couple and, in the best version of outcomes, told every day how ‘special’ they are to have been picked from all those other orphans. But then some greedy and maybe mad scientist invented surrogacy. Suddenly, the orphans could go hang. Narcissistic rich people started seeking babies who look like them. Then the gays got in on it. So, women are good for something, after all!
Gay surrogacy reached critical mass some years back when a storyline in the Archers had the resident Lovely Gay Couple, Adam and Ian, hiring a Bulgarian fruit-picker to have a baby for them. Lexi, the surrogate mother, has two children she is separated from due to economic circumstances. At this point, she is in the early stages of a relationship with a man who was once a racist but now understands that love sees no passport. After initial hostility to the fact that his lover would be renting out her womb to a pair of polenta-bothering ponces, former racist Roy saw the light and came to believe that there should be no just impediment to a Lovely Gay Couple’s right to Complete Their Family.
One becomes immune to headlines like the one in the Daily Mail this week: ‘Scott Mills reveals why he “can’t imagine” ever having children as he discusses life with husband’ – the ‘reveal’ obviously being that the Radio 2 presenter is a gay man married to another gay man. There is something risibly mimsy about men who can’t bring themselves to have sex with women but want to enjoy the benefits of reproduction. Can’t they just grit their teeth and do it the traditional way, as the late Paul O’Grady did? ‘People ask me how I’ve got a daughter and I say: “The same way your mum and dad had you!”. Someone held your chips and you cracked on with it in the bus shelter.’
Hellbound and Down 