“We’re Number One! We’re Number One!”
Well, to be completely accurate, we’re all “[1]” right now for some reason. The whole blog, back to the beginning, now shows that as the screen name of every commenter, and my name is either missing entirely as author or, in some cases, “[1]” as well. I was first alerted around 5 am by Diego Garcia, and quickly contacted WordPress via an email to their “Happiness Engineers” (yes, they really call themselves that. I got a quick response from WP’s AI creature, who told me that I obviously had my settings wrong and gave me a dizzying sequence of things to click on buried several lawyers deep in the system.
“Oh no you don’t!” I replied. Okay, what I actually wrote back was “Bullshit. I haven’t changed any settings, and you’re not going to lay this off on me. You caused the problem, the problem is yours, and you need to fix it. I am not a software engineer, and I don’t work for WordPress or robots. This is WordPress’s responsibility, and I expect WordPress to do it.”
Then I went back to bed. I was welcomed, upon awakening, to this from the modestly named “Deity,” my Happiness Engineer, who swears he is a Real Boy:
“I appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience you’ve been experiencing. Based on your description, it indeed seems like this issue is related to a known bug that’s currently affecting WordPress blogs.
I just wanted to reassure you that our top-notch technical team is actively working on resolving this issue as swiftly as possible. However, I can understand the importance of having this issue mitigated in the interim period.
In the meantime, as a workaround, you can use the following CSS code to overcome the problem: /* Make comment authors display properly*/.comment-meta .comment-author .fn { text-indent:0; }.comment-meta .comment-author .fn:after { display:none; }“
“Please be advised that this is a temporary solution until we implement a more permanent fix. Again, thank you very much for your understanding on the matter and I’m extremely grateful for your patience. We value your trust in WordPress and promise to keep you informed with updates as they happen.”
So the AI was spitting out bullshit, as usual, just as I surmised! Good to know.
Let’s not allow this to spoil the open forum. Please begin your entries today with your Ethics Alarms name.
But you’re all #[1] to me!
Ethics Alarms 
Thanks, Jack, for this info update. I was wondering yesterday who the heck commenter “[1]” was, and why would he or she (correct pronouns) give themselves (again, correct pronouns) such a stupid commenter name. …and why three needless comments in a row.
BTW…. Still waiting for that email or phone call.
BTW… the above comment was from Ian McElroy, not from “[1].”
Suggest every commenter include their (correct pronoun) commenter handle so everyone knows who the heck is commenting. (This sent by Ian McElroy).
Ulcerative Colitis and other related illnesses, such as Crohn’s Disease must be carefully managed. Flare ups can come at any time, sometimes triggered by diet or stress.
This father is getting flamed for excluding a 16-year old stepdaughter from a Disney vacation for the family’s six-year old son’s birthday because of the problems her illness causes and, it seems, in part because of her attitude which may or may not be connected to the troubles caused her Ulcerative Colitis.
https://www.yourtango.com/entertainment/stepdad-excludes-teen-chronic-illness-family-vacation
What do you think?
Is it ethical to make other arrangements for a minor child with a chronic illness that doesn’t appear to be well managed if there’s a good chance the illness will disrupt another child’s birthday trip? Do the ages matter?
A M Golden
TomP commenting:
The guy is an idiot, and his wife isn’t much better.
If I had a child who was hospitalized 8 times during the past 12 months, I wouldn’t be planning a week-long trip to anywhere let alone the other side of the continent. What the hell kind of priorities does this guy have?
What about the wife? The 16-year-old overheard the man and his wife discussing the trip. Was she ok with leaving the 16-year-old behind but changed her mind?
I am old school. I would never dream of going online to try and drum up support for my stupid decision.
Is he playing favorites? The 16-year-old perceives he is and apparently so does his wife. What anyone else may think is irrelevant. Perceptions are neither right nor wrong they just are.
Does age matter? Of course, it does. Adolescence is challenging enough without having a debilitating and embarrassing disease.
I wondered the same thing. Is the step-father treating his step-daughter differently because she is not his biological daughter? If so, what message does that send? It isn’t a good message, no matter how you cut the pie. He is an idiot but he is also cruel. The step-daughter’s mother isn’t much better.
jvb
A M Golden.
I agree with you on that last. Likely her “rudeness” mentioned in the article comes from standard adolescent contrariness exacerbated by the pitfalls of dealing with an illness with humiliating side effects.
But I wondered if it would be more unethical if the daughter were younger, closer in age to the brother, as opposed to being 16-years old. It would certainly be devastating to an 8-year old not to be able to accompany her brother to Disney World, for example.
Since Dad indicates that her frequent bathroom trips are inconvenient, surely a 16-year old should be able to excuse herself to use the restroom on her own as opposed to a young child who wouldn’t be able to go into a public bathroom alone.
And a 16-year old should be able to handle a pre-packed lunch better suited to her diet that might be more challenging to a younger child.
Just trying to figure out here why Dad is rejecting reasonable compromises, like a wheelchair, for a girl old enough to be able to monitor her own body signals. Is the girl just not cooperating with doctor’s orders, such as not avoiding foods that trigger the flare ups?
The wife (presumably mother) wants the girl to go.
Excluding a 16 year to take a 6 six year old is simply wrong. A 16 year old is old enough to take care of herself (even to stay in the hotel room by herself if her illness flaired up).
If she were 18, leaving her unless she paid her own way might be defensible. But at 16, you suck it up for family, and accommodate your children’s special needs as best you can.
*Demeter*
Haha. Technology is excellent when it works! When it doesn’t well… I still have a yard ornament that’s supposed to be a tractor thanks to something electrical. It’s been out the most of 2 years with issues in the computers. Oddly enough just as you’d assume, the environment tends to break sophisticated computers that are in the modern tractors.
Which brings me to my topic of right to repair. Currently there’s an ongoing debate on who can use the software to fix the glitch. It’s not just farm equipment, this includes you phones, wheelchairs, all sorts of items.
The companies argue you need a trained person to fix it and they have a right to the software they designed for their machine. I can tell you that it sometimes takes days for them to come out for 5 minutes and plug in their computer to essentially defrag and diagnose what happened with the tractor.
This has a lot of sides to it.
https://www.wired.com/story/right-to-repair-cars-hackers/
“Oddly enough just as you’d assume, the environment tends to break sophisticated computers that are in the modern tractors.” Technology is really great until it doesn’t work.
Yep. Tractors are frickin’ beautiful things. We have a John Deere Z530M 52″ zero turn. It is a lovely machine that cuts beautifully. Until it runs over the balled up barbed wire left in the tall grass by that stupid crackhead tree clearer guy who constantly spits because his front teeth no longer exist. Yeah, that tractor is lovely sitting in the side yard completely out of commission because you can’t find wire cutters strong enough to cut the contemptible barbed wire wrapped tightly around the spindles. One simply weeps.
jvb
Well if you can’t cut it, torch it!
(Another Mike)
Up your game jb: bolt cutters. I used a small set on barbed wire and 2-strand top wire. Or maybe fence pliers, depending on your grip.
/* Make comment authors display properly*/.comment-meta .comment-author .fn { text-indent:0; }.comment-meta .comment-author .fn:after { display:none; }
Is the code supposed to be entered by the blog post author, or by the commenters?
-Ryan Harkins
Ah, not in the comment itself, unless there are additional html flags you need to pre-process the CSS code.
I bailed on computer science when it seemed all the undergraduate courses were steering toward web development. That might have been a mistake…
-Ryan Harkins
Your Wyoming bronc rider made it through, Ryan! Hah! OB.
I’ll let the bucking bronco be my signature, then!
Ryan,
As a computer-science major that did not bail, let me congratulate you on dodging a cannonball-sized bullet.
WallPhone
The code is intended for the blog author to set on his server, then remove once the fix is in place. I’ve tested it and it doesn’t work though for whatever combination of styles Jack has selected, for reasons probably related to CSS’s inheritance model or me testing in the wrong place it simply doesn’t work and I even tried the !Important flag.
The good news is the the full post author name is indeed still in the HTML. Removing “display: inline-block” from the .fn style class will show them. It also leaves the bracketed digit in place, but my experience in coding .CSS is about a decade old and I’m not wasting more time on this.
I’d say that I’m going to make you guess who this is, but I think the picture is gonna give it away.
I think anyone who has ever called tech support understands the frustration of being told to restart their system, but the reality is that that actually works fairly often. This is more frustrating, and I feel like it’s getting more common. I don’t know whether I’m getting older and grumpier, or I’m genuinely dealing with less intelligent or less honest people, but it’s gotten to the point that whenever I call in for help or service, the people on the other end of the phone are the most vacant souls I’ve ever talked to, and they’ll just say things…. Whatever they think will end the call the fastest… Like the entire goal isn’t to actually fix the problem, it’s to close the ticket.
I used to think that this was a symptom of the great resignation – That’s where the baby boomer generation finally took Covid closures as an excuse to retire. The problem was that having so many experienced people resign at the same time meant that there was a cascade in people that maybe didn’t have the experience or expertise to be in their roles are suddenly in the workplace.
That’s annoying, and a problem, but it’s not a permanent one. The Chinese idea of “Kung Fu” isn’t explicitly or solely a martial arts style, “Kung Fu” translates to “Supreme Skill” and the term is associated with people who are at the pinnacle of their art, often in the art of martial combat. But even the man sweeping the stairs of the temple can have broom kung fu if he’s made it to the pinnacle of his art. Years of sweeping the same stairs, knowing the lay of his land, knowing which bricks are raised, which are cracked, exactly where the broom needs to be flicked. There might be other people just as good as him, but no one better. This has parallels in Western contexts, we sometimes talk about the 10,000 hours it takes to become genuinely good at something. And I think that makes sense…. 10,000 hours is about five years working full time. Your first year at a new job, you’re trying to take in information, you haven’t seen the full calendar year, there are constant things popping up that you’ve never seen, and you’re generally flopping around like a fish. But by year five you’re pretty darned established. You may or may not have work kung fu, but you have a little fu.
I don’t think that’s true for situations like this. This situation is worse, and I’ve come across it too: There’s a problem. They know there’s a problem. Their slack channels are full of the exact same issue. But they like…. gaslight you and try to make you think that the problem is literally anything other than what they know it to be, maybe out of some kind of sense of corporate shame? They’ll tell you to try things that they know won’t work and then blame things that they know aren’t at fault. It’s bizarre. This isn’t a knowledge problem, they know what the problem is. This isn’t an experience problem, because I think there’s actually a chance that they might be performing as instructed. This is a corporate culture problem where they have this like…. strong man persona where they are fundamentally incapable of admitting fault. And that’s going to have huge downhill ramifications when it comes to relationship building and trust.
A M Golden here
Unfortunately, you are correct. Stopping and restarting works more than it has any right to work. That’s why it’s a good idea to just do that first, then, if it doesn’t work, contact IT support and make sure you let them know you have already rebooted.
Not that it will help if a ‘bot is answering.
Yup, your icon gives you away. Sort of like my bucking bronco is pretty good clue for my identity…
Here’s the IT problem as I’ve seen it transpiring. The professionals who really know their stuff have been at their jobs for a very long time. They know everything, can handle everything, and have sizeable salaries that reflect their longevity. Corporations don’t want them on the front lines helping people reboot their computers or work through launching a command prompt and entering some command. They want their professionals reserved for the very hard problems. That means the less skilled workers are on the front line. Those workers are frequently inexperienced and receive low pay, and will often quit a demanding call center position for something less stressful. Furthermore, there is a growing dearth of people with the technical skillset required for competent IT troubleshooting. So corporations are then running through low-level employees at a rapid pace and do not have much of a pool to draw from for replacements. Instead, they develop the questionnaire lists that almost any idiot can walk a customer through. These low-level employees will often have no clue about the technological produce they are supporting. They are paid to just ask the questions on the list, and if something unexpected happens, escalate the problem to someone else. Eventually the issue might reach the professionals, who will then be able to fix the problem in a heartbeat, but in the meantime the customer has spent hours on the phone and has grown unbelievably frustrated. And the low-level employee quality is not really going to improve, because if they are not going to be around very long, employers don’t want to spend the money and effort to train them more thoroughly.
As one of my co-workers said just this morning, the IT experience is a case-study on how NOT to do customer service!
I think you’re right, and that’s going to be a part of it.
I also want to say that it’s not confined to IT, but it might be more noticeable there.
As an example, I deal with third party finance programs for some of my larger customers with seasonal cashflow. One of my customers requested a limit increase from the finance company, when the company ran the documents for that customer, they realized that the legal name of the corporation had changed. The finance company closed the original line without notifying me, then opened a new line up for the new company name without telling me who they were. This was a seven figure customer.
When I called to ask what the actual hell they were thinking I was told:
1) This hadn’t happened.
2) It had happened, but it didn’t change anything.
3) It had happened, and it did change something, but they couldn’t tell me about it because of PrIvAcY lAwS.
4) It happened, it changed things, they were contractually obligated to tell me about it, but wires were crossed on their end.
Between each layer of that cluster, I had to fight.
1) It obviously happened, where is LOC#XXXXXXXXXX?
2) The name is obviously different, I realized what happened because the guy’s name is in it, but if he called himself ACME INC, I’d have no way of knowing. And this is particularly awful because I don’t have (new name) as a customer, and LOC disbursement account names have to match the name on the receipts.
3) We literally sign data sharing agreements.
4) This is correct. Thanks for playing.
I feel like this is going to get more common before it gets better.
“Like the entire goal isn’t to actually fix the problem, it’s to close the ticket.”
That is because that is their entire goal. They don’t get evaluated on how well they provide IT support, they get evaluated on how many tickets they close and how quickly they close them. You get what you pay for, and IT support staff are paid to close tickets. They do not get paid to help anyone.
I could go on a long winded rant explaining the ins and outs of the problem, but in the end it all boils down to what companies are incentivizing, which is the closing of tickets.
I used to be pretty conversant with computer stuff, at least on the software end (hardware was never my cup of tea). No more.
I set up a teeny tiny web site about 20 years ago intended for my book business, and created a few html pages for it, with a couple bells and whistles. Very soon after that I hooked up with a company that designed professional looking and performing web sites for book sellers — I bought one and have been pleased to deal with them ever since.
Well, I didn’t get rid of the original web site, but over time the only thing I used it for was to store jpg images of my books — around 10k or so of them by now, totally perhaps 400MB storage or so. The home page simply redirects to my actual bookstore, so there is basically no traffic aside from bots.
The domain is still hosted by the same company, and today I opened up an email from them informing me that they’d charged my credit card for hosting for the next six months — what they didn’t mention that was immediately obvious to me was that they’d also raised their rate 50% since January. Well, enough is enough, this was getting ridiculous.
So I looked at Go Daddy — I have my bookstore internet site with them (although not the actual hosting), so I looked at their prices. Their rates appear to be about half what I am paying, plus they’ve a nice special if you prepay the first three years.
So, I called up chat on their website. Here was my thinking — several years ago I had a similar experience with my brokerage account — I called Fidelity and they were able to take my information, transfer all my holdings to them without my having to deal with any of the details. I did have to pay a bit of a forfeit to my previous broker, but when you’re desperate to get out, that’s a small price to pay. So I was hoping to arrange the same sort of thing here.
What I was hoping to avoid was to have to start from scratch uploading all these pictures (cover scans, actually). It could be done, but I know it would be a hassle. Well, I got on the chat, as I said, and told him what I wanted to do. He responded — I looked at that response, and wrote back “I have no idea what you just said”. Typos and sloppy writing didn’t help. He responded with something else that still made no sense to me.
Then he started asking something like what is the website design, is it xxx or Word Press. Something I still wasn’t following. Ugh. He suggested I ask the folks at the original hosting company. I tried to do that — he too responded in technobabble I couldn’t follow, Then he said the website was made using ‘the custom code’. Huh? I am a naturally calm, cool person but by now I was losing my patience (having already lost my wits, it seems). Finally the GoDaddy guy gave up and just quoted me a price plus a fee for the transfer — do I want to proceed to the payment?
Well, actually no by then I didn’t. I said good riddance to them both, after getting a phone number for GoDaddy. Then I wrote an email to the folks who created my bookstore website, asking what their price would be to host my pictures. I won’t enjoy it, but I’m reasonably sure I can figure out a global search and replace to change the picture urls in my database, and then reupload all the pictures.
It was always nice to know that I could store all sorts of files on the internet if I wanted to, but I have done less and less of it over the last decade. I asked them to perform a service for me that quite frankly I believe it fairly trivial. But I don’t know the right buzz words and the person I talked with wasn’t willing to do a little work to figure out what I needed done.
It makes me appreciate Fidelity more and more — they were professionals about it, although it’s also likely something they’ve done many times. Perhaps if I’d called GoDaddy instead of resorting to chat? No matter — I feel that I wasted most of the afternoon, and now this rambling account to share the misery.
Things did not used to be this hard or this complicated.
So, an update on this. My website provider emailed me back to tell me that hosting pictures is actually part of the service. So this summer I’ll be uploading all my pictures to them and changing the links in my database to match.
If my soon to be former web sit host had been content with expensive, but not quite exorbitant fees — well for me the status quo has a lot of inertia and I’ve been paying for years.
I can’t do anything about prices at the grocery store, but this bit of inflation I can lick. I wonder if I should see if I can find a WIN button….
It’s all a bunch of bull#2
(Says Michael)
I’m struggling with the comments on this, although I know that Twitter isn’t the real world.
I’m looking for a consensus on right-of-center opinion here on whether there’s a problem in this video, and if there is: What is it?
I’m aware that there is data saying that children generally do best in situations where a child is raised in a traditional nuclear family with a mother and a father. That’s the best case scenario, I make no bones about it.
This child was very likely not going to have that. And currently: Most children do not.
38% of adopted children go through the private domestic adoption system.
37% of adopted children go through the foster care system.
25% of adopted children go through the international adoption system.
37% of kids put up for adoption end up in the foster system. This is despite the reality that for every child up for adoption, there are 36 couples looking to adopt. How does that happen?
Biggest factor would be that the child isn’t newborn. 62% of adoptees in the private domestic adoption system are newborns or less than 1 year old when they are placed. Second biggest factor is probably that the parents were deemed unfit, but are fighting the system. But also, parents shop for kids like they’re picking toys out of the catalogue – They don’t just discriminate on age; Kids with disabilities are often overlooked, kids with “wrong” characteristics are overlooked. Race and gender discrimination are very real in adoption contexts.
My point is that while this child might have made it to a normal adoption, particularly as she was newborn, the reality is that more than a third don’t. And the comments seem to have a problem with gay adoption, period, not gay adoption of this particular newborn. The reality is that the same studies that say that a nuclear mom-and-dad structure is best also tend to say that the results of single parent families, families in abject poverty, and the foster system are worst, in varying order depending on the study, then there’s a massive results gap and then homo couples are slightly below hetero couples… Perhaps because what’s really important are resources and attention. Regardless, this is against the backdrop of the reality that the alternative to all of this is abortion.
I do not understand the response. It does not seem reasonable.
I will weigh in as someone right of center. The only issue to be considered is are these two ready willing and able to give the child unconditional love and attention. I don’t know these two so I cannot comment on their character nor should anyone else. Would I prefer to see the child raise in a heteronormative environment – sure but all other things must be equal. A mother and father environment does not mean that it will always be a better environment.
IMHO I saw nothing wrong with the video. Granted I found the heavy set guy a bit overly effeminate but that has no bearing on whether the child thrives in their home.
Why the hell is my news station posting a baby video of parents I don’t know, who I’ll never meet, with a heartstring piano accompaniment?
If I want to watch that crap I’ll tune to the Hallmark channel. Now, CBS, tell me why the President has and is repeatedly disavowing his granddaughter, and why that means he won more votes than any president in history and disserves re-election.
I don’t see anything wrong with the video, aside from the fact it was posted by CBS News which means it is probably just intended as pro-gay adoption propaganda. I don’t have a problem with the couple in the video, and actually I thought the video was rather sweet. CBS News and all the other propaganda outlets irritate me.
I overlooked who produced the video. This is not newsworthy
It’s a puff piece. Most puff pieces are not newsworthy, but they do serve the purpose of giving people a break from constant reports of death, destruction, chaos and other unpleasant but newsworthy things. The video is hopeful and sweet, and works fine as a puff piece. The problem is the entire news apparatus has been turned into the propaganda mouthpiece of the state. In isolation, I have no issues with this video. In the bigger scheme of things I am sick of the propaganda. Which is not the fault of the people in the video and not a good reason to make nasty comments on Twitter regarding them.
People on the right are sick of being told what to think, sick of being silenced and sick of being oppressed and gaslighted by the state and all the major institutions of the country. That frustration and anger is starting to be expressed in counterproductive ways. Adoption of leftist tactics like nastiness and cruelty is understandable but not excusable.
As a father who has witnessed all four his daughters coming into the world and being able to hold them for the first time, I definitely resonate with the feeling those two gentlemen have at seeing their newly adopted daughter for the first time. An infant just out of the womb, seeing the world for the first time (through eyes that can barely see, set in a head that has been a little bit squashed from the birth canal, mind) is something precious beyond words.
I understand fully what you’re talking about regarding what is considered best for a child and what options there really are. It is best for a kid to be raise by his biological parents, who in turn are married to each other, and so on. Of course, part of that so on is a loving relationship, a lack of abuse, a stable environment, and a host of other conditions.
Life is messy, and we do have to recognize that we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, especially if straining for the perfect is impossible. And against the backdrop of the possibility of abortion, it is better to live and perhaps have a crummy life than to be aborted.
Now, a quick confession. I haven’t read, and I have no intention of reading the comments on the twitter video. I can probably imagine them well enough from having encountered trolls all across the internet, and some comments are probably downright awful, hateful, invective-filled, and likely poorly reasoned. That’s all aside from the grammar, punctuation, capitalization, word use, and other conventions for easy communication that are ignored or directly flaunted.
Here’s my perspective as a conservative Catholic. There is a tension between trying to safeguard the perfect and care for those who are not in that perfect situation. Let me use traditional, sacramental marriage as the example. A valid, sacramental marriage is contracted between a baptized man and baptized woman who are both free to marry, fully intend to give each other their lives, are open to life, and intend to be faithful until death do they part. Once a sacramental marriage is contracted and consummated, that marriage can only be dissolved by death. However, an examination of the conditions of the espoused at the time of contracting their marriage might find that one or the other was not free to marry (such as already being married to someone else, or are too young, or are too closely related), or it was not a full self-giving (it was a shot-gun wedding because he got her pregnant), or it was closed to life, or they did not intend to be faithful to each other. Then the marriage could be declared null, because there was never a sacramental marriage in the first place.
In a society where most people marry and stay married, the unusual case of a couple seeking a declaration of nullity might be met with stern resistance, and the process will probably be far more thorough and biased towards declaring the marriage valid and sacramental. However, we know that there are valid reasons for seeking divorce — the Catholic Church traditionally lists the 4 A’s: abuse, adultery, abandonment, and addiction — and society can be tempted to relax the requirements for divorce because of these hard cases where it seems people (women in particular) are trapped in a bad situation and the marriage laws, or social stigma, or the Church itself, is forcing her to endure an awful life. This tension builds, especially when people note that it is wrong to trap someone in a terrible situation and then clamor for change.
The general arguments then follow a fairly predictable line. On the one side is advocacy for changing the rules so people can legitimately divorce more easily, and on the other side are claims of a slippery slope. On the one hand, we have concerns for individuals, on the other the legitimate concern that relaxing the normative means will have unintended consequences that are perhaps worse than the problems thus changes seek to solve. On the one hand, there is real suffering going on, but on the other is the fear that once the cat is out of the bag, there will be no getting it back in.
The care for individuals wins out. More people get divorced. More people seek a declaration of nullity. A new tension arises. The Church attempts to streamline the nullification process, but those take time, and more and more people are getting divorced. In truth, more and more people are treating marriage lightly, because now they can get out of it if they don’t like it. Now people are marrying without waiting for a declaration of nullity, and are up in arms when the Church declares their new unions sinful.
This continues on for decades, and pretty soon the Church is confronting a full-blown crisis. The number of divorced-and-remarried is at epidemic proportions. People are leaving the Church because the Church won’t declare their marriage null, or are offended on behalf of someone who couldn’t get a declaration of nullity. Demands increase for the Church to change her teachings on marriage, or continue to make it easier to declare nullity, or at least make a short-term dispensation. In the meantime, the calls to a traditional understanding of discernment for married life, understanding marriage as a life-long commitment, are being mocked as medieval, backwards thinking, out of step with modern times, or simply impractical.
In the meantime, ultra-traditionalists are harassing the divorced-and-remarried; priests are divided, with some turning a blind eye to the divorced-and-remarried, others proclaiming that there is nothing wrong with their current arrangement, and that all love must be from God, even if the Church declares that no marriage currently exists and the couple is engaging in adultery.
None of this touches on the great harm being done all around. Children whose parents divorce bear these scars lifelong, and they are not as resilient as many have previously claimed. This is true even when those children are adults when their parents divorce. It would seem that the best way to resolve these damages is for everyone to return to the traditional understanding of marriage as free, full, faithful, fruitful, and lifelong, but that is now a perfect situation that is practically unattainable, and striving to get there immediately pits the perfect against the good. But what is the good? That’s actually a highly debated matter, and one that has to take in vast scope of the problem, the years of poor marriage prep leaving generations without a solid appreciation for marriage, generations now that have seen divorce as common and even normal, all pitted against an unalterable teaching that a sacramental marriage cannot be dissolved and attempts to contract a new marriage are adulterous.
That is all a very long introduction to the matter of gay adoption. I do believe as the Catholic Church teaches that human sexuality has a specific meaning and purpose, and it is to bring a man and woman together in a union so intimate that their union gets a name nine months later. The sexual complementarity speaks of a number of things — man’s participation in creation, the outward giving of one’s life for spouse and offspring, even the relation between man and God — and seeking to make sexuality something else leads to problems. Not everyone is going to experience the same problems, or to the same degree, and some people will succeed in spite of those problems, but in general the problems are large.
It started with the approval of contraception in marriage to help spouses space out children. Once the separation of the unitive and procreative aspects of sex entered into the picture, the ball started rolling downhill. We’ve seen the fruits of that. Contraceptives for everyone. Rampant promiscuity. Adultery. No-fault divorce. In the midst of this, with the traditional understanding of sexuality falling apart, the approval for homosexual actions became much easier, because there was no remaining defense to say homosexual conduct was wrong. If sex isn’t about procreation, but having a pleasurable time with someone, why does it have to be constrained between a man and a woman? Why does it have to be between two people? We’re not sure where this ball will stop rolling, but certainly polyamory is on the table, and the only way to reverse the damages that are going on (rampant STDs, a majority of children born out of wedlock, endless strings of broken relationships, and so on) is to roll back to the traditional understanding of human sexuality.
The problem is that the cat is out of the bag, and innumerable obstacles have cropped up over time that prevent the cat from returning to the bag. The institutionalization of homosexual marriage is one such item. The permission for gay adoption would be another, further down the slope. For to undo homosexual marriage, you’ll have to undo gay adoption first, for as long as gay adoption is acceptable, it acts as that emotional barrier. And there is the question of, were society to roll back gay adoption, what does that mean for children who were adopted by same-sex parents?
I agree I would prefer that the child life with same-sex parents than be aborted. I could potentially be convinced to prefer same-sex parents over foster homes absent any prospect of adoption or healthy foster families, but in general, a well-run, attentive foster care system is preferable to gay adoption for the sake of the system that is seeking a return to a traditional understanding of sexuality.
That being said, acting hatefully — which is to say, willing harm on someone else in order to see them suffer — is terrible and detrimental all around. I think the hatefulness comes from an inchoate fear that the battle has been lost, that there will never be a return to the traditional understanding of sexuality, and all that remains is to lash out. That’s a poor attitude, as it hurts people needlessly, pushes people away, and makes the stance one is trying to defend appear unable to offer anything better than condemnation.
I don’t see any reason to despise these two men for adopting this baby girl. They are doing what they are legally permitted to do, and I have no ability to influence what happens in this situation, so the best I can do is pray they will raise her to the best of their ability. Would I prefer that same-sex couples not be allowed to adopt? Certainly. But that’s against a backdrop of the perfect. In that perfect world, there would be no abortion, no divorce, and every child up for adoption is taken into a loving home.
But we don’t live in a perfect world. Hating that fact doesn’t change it.
Ryan,
That was brilliant.
jvb
Yes, thank you for that comment.
What’s with the Disney-bound parents these days?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-i-hackedand-surviveddisney-world
This woman calls what she did a “hack”. Nope, in my opinion, she copped out. Having a nanny take your child to Disney World while you luxuriate in a resort hotel isn’t a hack.
What do you all think? Do you think it’s ethical to promise your child a trip like that and let someone else do all the work? She spent a ton of money and missed her girl’s experience. I wonder if she realizes some day she may wish she’d been there.
Yeah, I’d say a cop-out. While I KIND of sympathize with her not looking forward to the expense, and the crowds, she doesn’t strike me as very smart. First there’s the bribery in getting her child to stay in bed (instead of getting to the root of her insomnia), next, the scope of the bribe indicating she didn’t think it through, then the holier-than-thou “junior year English thesis on the portrayal of women in Disney movies”. She could be a good mother in plenty of other ways, but from what she chose to share it looks like she just views her kid as a burden, and has no real understanding of childhood and fairy tales.