Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

If fat people can’t adopt, who’s to say that drinkers or blacks won’t be next?

Rod Liddle says that the discrimination against overweight applicants wishing to adopt is only the latest vindictive witch hunt by bureaucrats and social workers against a minority. It is no more sensible than targeting an ethnic group or a social class

Should blacks be allowed to adopt healthy children? Or should they be kept as an emergency reservoir of care for the damaged or ill children nobody else wants? It is time we got a little more rigorous about who we allow to adopt the kiddies, don’t you think? Black people are slightly less likely, on average, to abuse their children sexually than are white people — however, that’s pretty much their only plus point. They are slightly less likely to stay together as parents and disproportionately more likely to have been involved in some form of crime. Black fathers will be less well-educated, on average, than their white counterparts and black families are more likely to be wallowing in the lowest income quartile. None of these indicators bodes well for the adopted child.

I’m not sure the white working classes should be allowed near the kiddies either. As you may have gathered recently, when children are hideously abused they are almost always in the ‘care’ of white working-class or African parents or relatives. The Africans do weird witchcraft stuff and then kill them, while the white chavs drug them and keep them hidden in a drawer under the bed in the misbegotten hope that they might extort money from the press, somehow, for their safe return. Which is another thing: the white working classes are also poorly educated in comparison with the norm and can be fantastically stupid.

They’re tightening up the adoption requirements in Leeds, at least. Not enough for me — I’m not convinced that anyone in Leeds should be allowed to adopt a child — but it’s a start. The gargantuan Damien Hall, for example, was rejected as an adoptive father because he is too fat. Damien weighs more than 24 stone; he is ‘morbidly obese’ with a body mass index of 42.

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