Montgomery County, Md., is one of the most liberal places in the United States. Its schools educate children in the joys of premarital and homosexual sex. Its taxes are among the highest. Its liberal Democratic political machine is state of the art. So it is the perfect chosen residence for a lesbian couple having their 15 minutes of fame.
One of the women, Helen Rubin, 33, gave birth just after midnight on Jan. 1 in Fairfax, Va., to the first baby born in 2003 in the Washington metro area. Rubin had been artificially inseminated by “a friend,” according to front-page articles in major dailies. The mother’s partner, Joanna Bare, 35, could not legally adopt the baby girl in Virginia, so the couple moved to Bethesda, Md.
“This child is going to have a traditional family,” proclaimed Howard Rubin, the girl’s grandfather, at a press conference, noting that the couple have “traditional grandparents on both sides, traditional aunts and uncles.”
“Hopefully, we will be like every family,” Miss Bare said.
But they are not. If they were, it would not be news. The idea that the lesbian “family” is normal is based entirely on norms upheld by others. Thus the moral capital of normalcy is conferred upon a relationship that sabotages the very idea of normalcy. Saying that something is normal over and over does not make it so.
As for what the little girl, as yet unnamed, will be told when she begins to ask questions about her father, the couple says they will cross that bridge later. It’s a little like those feminist-spawned hyphenated last names, which are good for about one generation: “With the power invested in me by the state, I now declare Mr. Crane-Smith and Miss Cardy-Hopper to be husband and wife. May I now present Mr. and Mrs. …uh, Crane-Smith-Cardy-Hopper.” Imagine the next wedding.
A few years ago, in an unguarded moment, a lesbian activist revealed that her toddler son had looked up from his high chair and uttered, “My daddy is far away.” She said she and her partner laughed, a bit ruefully, and noted that they would have some explaining to do.
Indeed they will. Dad’s absence is no small thing. When men and women cleave together as husband and wife, they create not only new life but continue patterns of kinship, confer family names and bloodlines, and sink new roots that foster more families that are the foundation of communities. Homosexual relationships cut off branches from the family tree and replace them with artificial limbs. Unlike adoptions by married couples, the additions do not graft into a natural pattern. The tree might look similar for a while, but not over time. If the well-meaning Mr. Rubin thinks that his family will be no different from others a generation or two from now, he is whistling in the wind. There will be no family line, just a conglomeration of individuals involved in “relationships.”
The late conservative philosopher Russell Kirk warned in a speech for Hillsdale College in 1977 and printed in Imprimis that the devaluation of the family would eventually spell the end of Western civilization. “If the family disintegrates, there remain only two modes of human existence. The first of these is an atomic individualism, every man and woman isolated and self-seeking. … Such a phase is adventitious and transitory merely. It is succeeded, ordinarily, by the second alternative mode … compulsory collectivism.”
Most socialist revolutionaries are also sexual revolutionaries, because the strength of families presents an obstacle to the growth of the state. Sexual relations outside marriage weaken the family, providing opportunity for social engineers and more government. As Montgomery County moves closer to outright socialism, it will be a magnet for those who reject the designs of nature and nature’s God.
Babies, through no fault of their own, are brought into the world in all sorts of conditions, social and medical. Even before she took her first breath, the New Year’s baby was the most precious of God’s creations.
May God bless this fatherless child and every child, born and unborn. And may God give us the wisdom to restore the primacy of the family before Montgomery County becomes the “norm” for a fatherless America.
Robert Knight is director of the Culture and Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America.
