20150903

What means...'normal'?

I heard that the Premier of NSW was asked in parliament by an MP who with her female companion (ah, remember that phrase?) is raising children, if he thought that arrangement was not 'normal'.

I didn't need to hear the fluffy talk that would follow, but here's how it should have gone:

Premier: Normal? What do you mean by 'normal' (a rhetorical technique pioneered by Bill Clinton)?

MP: [pauses, slightly flumoxed] Well, ordinary, everyday, the sort of thing that normal people do?

Premier: Oh, when I heard the word 'normal' I immediately thought of the normal distribution. I would have thought that two friends of the same sex raising children would be far off to one side of the distribution: a long way from most of the population. In other words, 'not  normal'.

MP: [flaring] Not normal! You bigot.

Premier: I'm sorry that you are surprised, but how is it 'normal'? I mean, think of the children you look after. Where did they come from? Did you and your friend have them...[chuckles] that would be the first sperm-free conception ever!

MP: [cranky, with a dopey look on her face] We love our children.

Premier: I am glad. One should always love children; and I expect you use the 'our' in the sense that you have parental responsibility for them, but only one of you could actually be the parent. Is not that so?

MP: [petulant] I don't see what you are getting at.

Premier: [with a kindly facial expression] What I am getting at is that the conception of children requires male and female, and unless the children in your care came from a prior relationship of one of you, then one of you had to step outside your friendship to conceive. And do the children know their father? I mean their real father? The man whose genes they have? Or are the cut off from the person who helped form them?

Do you know there is  a movement of people conceived by sperm donarship to find their fathers...they don't want to be dis-identified with their father, they want to know them?

MP: Bigot!

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