Unconscious

“Unconscionable,” said Janice Shaw Crouse last week of Mary Cheney’s decision to have a baby. But in a piece she wrote on the issue for Townhall.com, she demonstrated that she’s the one without a conscience.

“Mary Cheney’s pregnancy poses problems not just for her child, but also for all Americans,” argues Crouse. According to her, 37 percent of American children are born to “fatherless families,” and “Mary Cheney is contributing to [the] trend…of women who don’t want a man in the picture, but want to have a baby.”

I am baffled. Either – there’s no charitable way to put this – Crouse is a moron of the first degree, or she thinks her readers are. The statistics are those of heterosexual single parent families, women who have gotten pregnant outside of committed relationships or who have been abandoned by men who didn’t want the responsibility (or, perhaps, are already committed elsewhere).

This is a serious issue, but I am at a loss to understand how two educated, professional women who have been in a committed partnership for 15 years (and, I presume, would be married if only the law allowed) and who have made the conscious decision to raise a child together serve as inspiration for heterosexual women to become single mothers.

Crouse engages in all manner of speculative, amateur psychological quackery, with a heavy dose of sleight-of-hand. “Too often,” she writes, “children in single-mother households end up angry at their absent fathers.” But Cheney’s child won’t be in a “single-mother” household, it will be a “double-mother” household. And children are often angry at their absent father because he made a choice not to be a meaningful part of their lives. Here, there’s simply no father, but there are two loving parents. “Fatherless children tend to have trouble dealing with male authority figures,” she claims. I don’t think Cheney is planning on whisking her child off to be raised by the Amazons; certainly with Grandpa Dick and his friends around, the child will have more than its share of male authority figures with which to contend.

“When fatherless children get to be teens, the girls tend to start looking for love in all the wrong places and the boys tend to find as their role model the bad-boy celebrities.” My, how conventional wisdom changes! I thought when boys had an absent father and a dominant mother, they grew up to worship Judy Garland.

To support her contentions, Crouse is able to cite not one study or professional by name. Instead she vaguely refers to “top experts,” as well as “a Georgia high school principal” -- because, as we all know, Georgia high schools are being overrun by pregnant lesbians -- and “an assistant principal in a junior high.”

The real threat posed by Mary Cheney’s pregnancy is that it will force people like Crouse to acknowledge that many gay people are stable, commitment-oriented family types. (Some of us go to church weekly, and apparently some of us are even Republicans!) Being a devoted, responsible, loving parent has absolutely nothing to do with sexual orientation.