Theopublican hyenas come out to howl

I knew when I posted the Mary Cheney pregnancy story that the Christianists would soon be out in force fussing and fuming and moralizing as usual. One would hope that Republicans will get sick and tired of these people, after all these are the extremists who scared off so many voters from the GOP and handed the House and Senate to the Democrats.

Concerned Women for America sent Janice Crouse out to attack the pregnancy. In they past they usually sent out Robert Knight, one of the old time gay haters. Crouse said: “They’re deliberately bringing a child into the world without a father, leaving a great gaping hole.”

She went on to complain this leads to “all sorts of negative outcomes”. Actually the studies do show that a child in a single parent home does worse than a child with two parents. But the Cheney child will have two parents. The Christian Right is using claims about single-parent families and applying them to two-parent families. A bit dishonest but par for the course for them.

Studies of children raised “without fathers” are not studies of same-sex couples raising children at all. They are studies of single mothers raising children. And most of them are single mothers because they got pregnant, didn’t marry, lived on welfare, came from troubled backgrounds themselves, etc. In other words they were about the worst people possible to raise children. No wonder their kids were screwed up.

The Christianists then use the term “fatherless” which was applied to children of single mothers and applied it to a two-parent home. Of course if a child is raised by a male gay couple he is not “fatherless” and in fact has a surplus. Then the Christians claim that children raised by a mother and father are better off but again the comparison group is not children raised by two men but children raised by single mothers.

Of course Robert Knight still let off some steam. This time he was speaking for the Culture and Media Institute. (What would a cretin like Knight know about culture?) He said it was “tragic that a child has been conceived with the express purpose of denying it a father.”

The “express purpose”? Does he think Mary and Heather sat down and said: “Gee, what can we do today? I know lets get pregnant just so we can create a child without a father.” No, they didn’t want to be parents. They were just out to take fathers away from children. What a sick view of people these people have.

He gets worse. He says that “what they’re seeking is to force others to bless their nonmarital relationship as marriage”. Talk about perverse logic. They are having a child, how is that forcing anything on others? And if they were allowed to marry legally it wouldn’t be a nonmarital relationship. Knight says this is “sexual anarchy”.

The far Right Focus on the Family also attacked the pregnancy. A spokesman for them said: “Love can’t replace a mother and a father.” I can think of numerous children beaten to death by drunken fathers. In that case replacing the father with love would be a damn good idea.