Disenginuity

William Saletan writes the Human Nature column for Slate.com, now part of the Washington Post media empire (and it shows). Yesterday morning, he wrote a column concerning Mary Cheney's pregnacy. For those of you who don't keep up with the news out of Washington D.C., Mery Cheney is the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney. She's also, in a slightly interesting coincidence, a Vice President herself, over at AOL.
I like Human Nature, and read it whenever I remember to. (Hardly a ringing endorsement, I know.) During my most recent reading, this statement caught my eye: "Moralists are denouncing Cheney's pregnant daughter, Mary, for disclosing that she and her lesbian partner will raise the baby together. The moralists are confident that having two mommies is bad for kids. And no evidence to the contrary can dissuade them."
My very first thought after I read this was: "Is he for real?" Not that I don't think that certain segments of the surprisingly large population of moralistic busibodies in this world have locked on to Mery Cheney over her descision to become a mother. But the idea that groups like Focus on the Family actually care how good or bad people are as parents strikes me as utterly inane.
Saletan is correct when he states that no ammount of evidence to the contrary will ever shift the moralists from their view that homosexuals are, to the last person, unfit to be in the same area code as children. But that's because, I suspect, that they believe that homosexuals are, to the last person, unfit to be tainting the Good Earth with their footsteps.
What's really going on here is simple. The conservative moralist jihadis that Saletan is referring to are convinced that Mary Cheney and her partner are deliberate and unrepentant sinners, who are heading straight for damnation, and will drag the innocent children that they raise with them. Since I suspect that the moralists we're speaking of are fundamentalists, and/or other flavors of reactionary Christians, I suspect that they consider all non-Christians to be unfit parents as well, along with anyone who doesn't bring their children up to follow what they would consider to be "acceptable" moral teachings.
Pretending that we take their arguments about the relationship between a person's sexuality and their parenting abilities at face value is a pointless charade that does nothing constructive.