A child’s needs
Sir: I doubt the suggestion in your leading article (29 March) that clause 14(2)(b) of the government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is a moral disgrace.
The Bill breaks new ground in allowing two people of the same sex to be registered as the sole parents of a baby born through IVF. With female joint parents this raised the question of what was to be done about the provision in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 which requires that a woman shall not be provided with IVF treatment unless account is taken of the welfare of any resulting child. A parenthesis adds ‘(including the need of that child for a father)’. But this ‘need’ can scarcely be met when two women are the sole registered parents or a single IVF mother has no relationship with the child’s biological father.
The government’s first answer to this problem was simply to repeal the now inappropriate parenthesis, but a storm ensued. The government responded with the present wording of clause 14(2)(b), which substitutes the phrase ‘supportive parenting’ for ‘father’.
This logically follows from the major change in legal policy, embedded in recent legislation, which prohibits homophobia, treats a lesbian household as morally equivalent to a heterosexual one and accordingly allows a lesbian couple to adopt a child or procure one through IVF treatment. Unless this major change is in itself a ‘moral disgrace’, which few would nowadays argue, then clause 14(2)(b) cannot be one.
Francis Bennion
Retired parliamentary counsel, Budleigh Salterton, Devon
Sir: If every child ‘needs a father’, it is paltry and vindictive to require it only of sub-fertile lesbians needing IVF, and not for the fecund and feckless single mothers who account for the vast majority of fatherless babies. If the ‘welfare of the child’ is to be truly paramount, couples must be forced to use birth control until permitted to reproduce (perhaps on a ‘points system’?) by government quango.
Dr Robert Johnston
Northampton
Less is more
Sir: In The Spectator’s Notes (29 March), Charles Moore condemns the phrase ‘any time soon’ on the grounds that the word ‘soon’ is sturdy enough to stand on its own. But his paragraph starts off with the phrase, ‘More and more people’.
Is ‘more and more’ a greater number than ‘more’?
Edward Hurworth
Chislehurst, Kent
Obama’s snake-oil
Sir: Matthew Parris (Another voice, 29 March) defends Barack Obama’s speech on race very well. But surely we ought to resist the core of Mr Obama’s case?
The Reverend Wright said some horribly stupid things, and Mr Obama rightly distances himself from them. Mr Obama was on half-decent territory when he said that black and white ‘bitterness and bias’ are sort of equivalent. (Though he might have stressed that one is indulged and the other isn’t.) Still, we don’t have to accept Mr Obama’s insistence that he be allowed to build a case on ‘the black experience’.
Suppose a BNP (or a Labour or even a Tory) speaker argued that while he’ll renounce any strongly racist utterance, he can’t altogether renounce nastiness among working-class people, and not only because there is nastiness among upper-class people, but more because it’s all part of the white working-class collective thing.
Mr Obama says he can’t renounce the ‘black community’, warts and all. Wouldn’t we say that this is the curse of identity politics? I have a nasty feeling that Mr Obama’s speech is the cleverest sort of snake-oil — the kind that has queues of intellectuals lining up to endorse it.
Richard D. North
Fellow, The Social Affairs Unit, London W1
Life and death issue
Sir: May I be allowed a single comment on the gracious article concerning myself (‘A holy man tipped to lead the nation’s Catholics’, 22 March)? Towards its end, in response to a question as to whether I would ever leave my monastery, I am credited with the words: ‘Yes, I think it is time to leave. I can’t stay there forever…’ I find no trace of these words in the recording I made of the interview. Certainly they do not express my mind. As a Benedictine with a vow of stability, I cherish the intention of living and dying in my own community, and have my heart firmly set on the plot in our cemetery which awaits me. For a monk, this is not a minor matter.
Dom Hugh Gilbert, OSB
Pluscarden Abbey, Moray
Puzzlement and delight
Sir: I read the article by David Selbourne (‘We are living in a state of emergency’, 29 March) with a mixture of delight and puzzlement; delight at the argument thereof — apart from the references to Cromwell, whose republican experiment ended in failure in 1660 with the Restoration — and puzzlement to the authorship.
Can this be the same David Selbourne who argued in a previous issue (‘No more Pax Americana’, 14 April 2007) that he hoped resurgent Islam would arise again and punish us all for our wickedness? Are there two David Selbournes or is there only one, who has had a Pauline conversion, and now understands the real menace of Islamist fascism and the need for proper pride in our present liberal democracies and their collective heritages?
I think we should be told.
John Draper
Via email
A slow run thing
Sir: Henry Sands is quite wrong (Diary, 22 March) when he claims that his pal Mr Tolstoy recorded the slowest time of the season on the Cresta Run this year. A chap with a group from Krug champagne posted a time of 197 seconds; I witnessed it and it was nothing short of exquisite, in a way. I think it gave me frostbite.
Mr Sands should apologise to his literary chum.
John Springs
London SW3
Taste the difference
Sir: I was initially impressed by Charles Moore’s son’s theory regarding the position of our taste buds (The Spectator’s Notes, 29 March), according to which canapés and open sandwiches are served the wrong way up. But as I have discovered after some experiments of my own, there is a problem aside from the obvious one of gravity. This is that the roof of the mouth is very tender and does not respond well to having abrasive foodstuffs pressed against it. It would make much better sense if the taste buds were up there and the tongue was merely a probe for heat and texture. Reluctantly, I conclude that canapés are not put together wrongly, but that we are.
John Squibb
Shropshire
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