Spawned in a lab

The “conservative” vice president and his “conservative” wife are de-lighted by their lesbian daughter’s having conceived via sperm donor a child that will be raised by her and her lesbian partner. The “conservative” president is de-lighted about it too. And again, as with so many outrages coming from this president and vice president, most “conservatives” are silent, not wanting to criticize, because “conservative” solidarity is more important to them than conservative principle, or even what once would have been thought of as normal decency. VFR reader Laura W. has written about the damage done to children who were conceived in such a way as to deprive them of knowing their natural parents, as well as their other relatives. It’s one thing when there is a tragic death or a necessary adoption that results in parent-child separation. But deliberately to conceive a child by such unnatural, anonymous means is not right.

In an eerie confirmation of Laura’s thesis, a 17 year old girl writes in the Washington Post about what it means to have been conceived that way, and about her search for her natural father, meaning—let’s be brutally frank here—the man whose participation in the girl’s birth consisted of his masturbating into a test tube and handing the test tube to a lab technician.

Laura W. adds:

Notice the girl’s fascination with the very word “biological.” Notice too the existential horror of her situation. How can she condemn her mother, who is the only link to her past, and yet how can she not condemn her, given her thoughtlessness at the moment of her conception? Finally, notice her wonderful evocation of what a father means to a girl, every girl, physically. Thus, her pain tells of not just the dilemma of “donor children,” but of the adopted children of homosexual couples.

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Charles G. writes:

Of all the pieces written about the president and vice-president at this website, I think this did the most to reveal what a pair of moral and intellectual dwarves they really are. If self-absorbed moral nihilism has a face, our national leadership is it.

RB writes:

I guess in these unbelievably (from the standpoint of someone born before 1960) degenerate times, we would have to count it as a minor victory if the father turns out to be white.

Showing that the views expressed in this blog entry are not exactly widely shared in the conservative establishment, Alan R. writes:

Look at what Jay Nordlinger (a big fan of the President) said today at NRO:

The other day, President Bush was asked what he thought about Mary Cheney and her baby. I imagine that Bush’s views are “traditional,” let’s say. But he said how wonderful it was.

Sheer class, that man has. Sheer class.

Perhaps, in some sense, the President has to say crap (pardon my French!) like that, because he and his party need lots of votes, but Jay is not a politician.

LA replies:

Here’s what Nordlinger is saying: Bush’s views are “traditional,” meaning that Bush himself, left to his own devices, believes in traditional morality and would not approve of a homosexual couple having a test tube baby. However, Bush has risen above his narrow traditionalist prejudices to show humanitarian good will for Mary Cheney’s “family” and even to say how wonderful the creation of this “family” is. This demonstrates Bush’s “sheer class,” i.e., his large-mindedness, i.e., his moral superiority. What this means is that Bush’s celebration of a homosexual couple having a test-tube baby is of higher moral value than Bush’s traditional morality.

Thus, for “conservatives” such as Nordlinger, liberalism supersedes conservatism.

As long as conservatism is a mere subset of liberalism, as long as conservatives’ highest values are liberal values, conservatism is meaningless—the equivalent of having a “conservative” salon aboard the Titanic.

Also, Nordlinger’s approval of Bush’s approval of Mary’s test-tube baby shows once again what a disaster for conservatism it is has been to have a Republican conservative president who is in fact a liberal, because conservatives feel compelled to support that president’s every liberal move and thus to destroy whatever remains of their own conservatism. I repeat what I said throughout 2004, that Bush’s reelection would spell the ruin of conservatism.

Laura W. writes:

There is no politically valid reason for Cheney and Bush to have said what they said. They could have opted for silence (though still shown cold-blooded liberalism in doing so.) There is only one word to describe, in this context, Cheney, Bush and Nordlinger: heartless. Forget “liberal,” label them simply heartless. They are what C.S. Lewis called “Men Without Chests.”

So he says in The Abolition of Man: “It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest that makes them seem so.” We have entered a post-human age.

Laura says that Nordlinger has no heart. Jacob M. has a different angle on him:

Nordlinger is certainly a bizarre specimen. Did you know that he quite literally loves George W. Bush? In this column, he wrote that Bush is a “Rushmore-level president” and that “I have a deep fondness—love, really—for the man, though I don’t know him.” A textbook example of “This is your brain on Dubya” if there ever was one. Bush could exclaim, “Workers of the world, unite!” and Nordlinger would find a way to somehow spin it as conservative.

Ben writes:

Have you read anybody yet condemning the President for his praise of Mary Cheney yet? I haven’t. It’s like you can hear a pin drop across the conservative mainstream.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 19, 2006 08:27 AM | Send