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The death of the concept of a norm

A recent Facebook group discussion of marriage, sex, and children has prompted the following reflections:

There is a severe failure to comprehend the natural law across the political spectrum in Western society today in the area of what it means to consider something to be "the norm." For example, suppose that I say that it should be considered the normal way to develop families and make babies that first you get married and then the husband and wife have biological children together. Suppose that one says that this should be held up as the ideal and as what we should be aiming for.

A surprising number of people will be confused about this and will think that, by so saying, one is saying that adoption is morally wrong or even that adopted children are somehow inferior or tainted. Or you may be said to be "insensitive" to couples who experience infertility.

Similarly, suppose that one says that in vitro fertilization is wrong and abnormal. Many people think that this means that one is calling the children thus conceived abnormal or being mean to them by saying that the circumstances of their conception were sinful and should not be held up as a model.

An extreme example of this failure to understand what a concept of a norm amounts to is the use of phrases like "differently abled" for children with various disabilities. The idea seems to be that if you regard deafness, blindness, or Down Syndrome as a tragedy and a privation, you must despise the children and adults who have these privations.

A certain amount of conceptual nuance is needed to say something like this: "Adoption is a response to a tragedy of some sort or another, and possibly to sin. The original intention was not for parent-child relationships to be formed like this, though it is laudable and generous for people to be willing to adopt. But we should not hold up adopted families as the societal norm. On the contrary, we should whenever possible model adopted families as closely as possible after the real societal norm, which is nuclear biological families. This is not blaming or scorning adoption. It is merely recognizing what the model of the family should be."

But apparently that idea of a model or an ideal that doesn't involve blame or "looking down on" is just too hard for some to grasp.

What is passing strange is that at the same time, in others in Western society, we have what might seem to be the opposite error. For example, many babies with birth defects are aborted all over the world because they are despised, unloved, seen as disposable garbage. And many infertile people go to extreme and even unethical lengths to conceive a child artificially. And it had better be a perfect child, exactly the child they want, when they do so.

Should this be seen as just an "extreme" example of the natural desire to have a biological child? Should the abortion of disabled babies be seen as an "extreme" understanding of the privation of disability?

That isn't quite right, either. Those, also, seem to arise from a failure rightly to understand the concept of a norm. A right understanding of the concept of a norm leads to compassion for those suffering privation. If you hate the disabled child and want to kill him, you definitely don't have a right concept of a norm. A real concept of the privation of disability is not equivalent to "quality control" in human reproduction. It is a sad privation for a child to be severely mentally disabled, and it is a recognition of the abilities "proper to" mankind to realize this. But it is deeply unnatural for humans to murder their offspring, any of their offspring, including the disabled.

Moreover, a right understanding of the normal way of generating children shows that having a baby using highly unnatural fertility treatments isn't what the couple wanted in the first place anyway! Even when the treatments are not intrinsically immoral (e.g., perhaps the woman merely takes some very mild fertility drug that has no tendency to produce quintuplets), they usually have unwanted side effects. And the more outlandish the treatments become (IVF, artificial insemination, etc.), the farther they are from the original, natural desire to have biological children in the old-fashioned way. Compassion for infertile couples and a recognition of the normativity of having one's own biological children hardly requires an approval of any and every means of producing children who are biologically related to the couple.

It is odd but perhaps instructive to notice that a common theme in what might seem to be opposite confusions is the misuse of compassion and love. It is, supposedly, not compassionate and loving to say that adoption is a response to brokenness in the world and hence is not the norm for family-forming. It is, supposedly, not compassionate and loving to say that disabled children (the ones who are allowed to live at all) are suffering disability rather than just being "different" and perfect in their difference. It is, supposedly, not compassionate and loving to refuse to accept an infertile couple's willingness to do anything, anything at all, to have biological children of their own. It is, supposedly, not compassionate and loving to judge those who abort disabled children, because you haven't walked in their shoes.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the very same people say all of these things. Very often that is not the case, particularly with regard to the views of the disabled. But I am saying that all of these stem from a use of compassion as an excuse for the emphatic rejection of the natural light and the natural law or even of any concept of naturalness whatsoever.

Ultimately, even the manifestations of this confusion that result in good actions (affirming adoptive families, loving disabled children) have negative ripple effects in society and in the Christian community. When I originally started this post, I didn't intend to mention homosexuality, but it arises here naturally as an example. How many of us found, when debating Obergefell and homosexual "marriage," that we were dealing with Christians and even conservatives who had no notion whatsoever of the natural law, the natural telos of marriage, the natural connection between complementarity of male and female, reproduction, and family formation? How many of us ran into a stare (electronic or literal) of blank incomprehension at the notion of normalcy? Too many of us, I suspect. I certainly did.

I don't know if the impoverishment and even outright rejection of the concept of a norm is more a Protestant or a Catholic problem. It certainly is a secular problem, but it clearly has come into the church itself, at multiple points. I can only suggest raising kids with the notion of a norm and with concrete ideas of how it applies to specific situations, and even discussing these matters with them as they get older. That may be the only way to reinstate it, at least in our little platoons.

Comments (36)

Lydia,

I love this post!!!

I was just thinking about this theme in relation to (surprise, surprise) the efforts of the Left, and specifically the academy, to undermine common-sense notions of norms in everyday discourse. A good example is the two-parent family raising their biological children -- all sorts of academics have made an effort (lame as it might be) to cast aspersions on the integrity, ubiquity, and utility for children of the traditional two-parent family. (I just read an essay called "The Way We Never Were" -- you can Google it if you want -- and it was as depressing as you can imagine based on that title. I may dig it out for a future blog post if I'm in the mood to attack sloppy thinking, but right now it is just depressing.)

My students read for today an essay by Allen Verhay about a newborn left to die -- back in 1982 -- because he had been born with Down's and esophageal atresia (he couldn't swallow), a condition that would have been treated without question had he not had DS. But because the parents were so very "compassionate," and didn't want him to have to endure a low-quality life, they refused the surgery and left him to starve. (Never mind that multitudes of people offered to adopt him.) It's a good essay for helping them to see that compassion must be grounded in Biblical truth to be of any use to us.

Verhay's main point, by the way, is how the stories we tell form our understanding of the norm -- what it means to be a normal parent, a true doctor, etc. When we tell the wrong stories about these ("a good parent has perfect children"; "a good doctor puts costs of life first"), then we create a culture in which it *becomes* the norm to kill imperfect children. So we need to teach explicitly the truth on which our compassion must be founded, and we must tell story after story after story that *demonstrates* that this truth is God's norm.

Well, I was pretty sure "science" has proven that the ideal is children being raised by exactly two people of the same sex, that are not close relatives, and...perhaps most critical of all...engage in homosexual conduct together. Although, sometimes, it can be just as good for children to be raised by two people of the opposite sex.

But apparently that idea of a model or an ideal that doesn't involve blame or "looking down on" is just too hard for some to grasp.

You have to see it from the perspective of the people who don't want to embrace the ideal/model. Subcultures like punk and goth are filled with bitter people who cannot accept society's unwillingness to embrace them and their lifestyle. Sounds insane, right? Except a lot of them earnestly get upset that flying their freak flag has consequences. Same here with these norms. You see an ideal, they see a standard they are expected to live up to that flies in the face of their choices one way or another. Bottom line is, they don't measure up to your measure of what is the good choice.

Many Christians don't realize that indulging this behavior is nonsense. It's socially and individually harmful. And one particularly harmful aspect is that it causes people to engage in far too much navel gazing and not enough honest self-criticism and evaluation.

Actually, Mike, I see the problem as far more widespread than among those who don't want to live according to the model. This post was kicked off by a discussion among people who _are_ married and _do_ have biological children in nuclear families. But the idea of saying that adoption is modeled after the biological nuclear family rather than being somehow co-equal with it (including, btw, adoption by single women) was just, apparently, angering to some (esp. one person) in the discussion. It wasn't even a socially liberal context. But there was just a kind of big blank when it came to any notion of "naturalness." Like "What does that mean?" Or even a religious spin on it: "God sovereignly ordained from all eternity for this child to have this parent by adoption, so who are you to say that in any sense this situation is less than perfectly ideal?"

I sometimes think it does arise in Protestant circles from a kind of tacit anti-Catholicism: If we start talking about what is natural or known by the natural light, we are "going beyond the Bible."

I sometimes think it does arise in Protestant circles from a kind of tacit anti-Catholicism: If we start talking about what is natural or known by the natural light, we are "going beyond the Bible."

I think you may be right, there. I know that there are Catholics who reject the natural law, but that is pretty much a modern problem, and mostly it stems from Catholics who don't actually understand their own faith properly, for Church teaching is squarely behind the rightness of the natural law. But I suspect that it is found systematically more in Protestant circles. Whether from an anti-Catholic sentiment, or from other sources, I could not say.

It might be politic to de-emphasize the idealism of the norm. That is, norm is norm, ideal is ideal.A normal family is not the same as an ideal family.

Also, norm refers to the species, and not to the individual. Thus, sentiments of the type you cite
"God sovereignly ordained from all eternity for this child to have this parent by adoption, so who are you to say that in any sense this situation is less than perfectly ideal?"
may be side-stepped.

Both terms "norm" and "ideal" are somewhat fuzzy, I grant, and in some of their senses don't always overlap. After all, a normal family can be bad in some given instance.

I intended to use them _just here_ as roughly coterminus in a vaguely Platonic sense: There is a "form" of the family that is the way God in the beginning intended families to be formed--one man and one woman, married to each other, have biological children. Setting aside the effects of either sin or death, there would never be occasion for single-parent families (even those formed non-sinfully by death of a spouse), single-parent adoption, or adoption at all. Obviously, now we _do_ have sin and death, so sometimes children are born out of wedlock, a spouse abandons another spouse with children, one or both parents die, and so forth. The vaguely Platonic notion meant by "ideal" was also intended to explain the fact that I think even adoptive families should be formed in imitation of that form: Two parents, one father, one mother, having exactly the same authority over the adopted child once the adoption is completed that biological parents would have, no one else having any additional right to interfere, and so forth.

The rejection of Natural Law in Protestant circles is a modern phenomena. Fideism and presuppositionalism had almost no place in the Reformation tradition prior to the 20th Century.

Is there anything amiss to just saying that it is a basic truth, or inherent good for one to have a relationship with their biological parents? It is just obvious that all of us have only one biological mother or father, and neither can just be replaced. However, if a child need's to be adopted, there are potentially many possible adoptive parents.

It is concerning just how difficult this is to comprehend for the types that will accuse us of hating adoptive children or homophobia for suggesting it is the ideal that children have a relationship with their mom and dad. It seems to me that there is no good rationale in their viewpoint to justify it being normative for newborns to go home with their mom and dad. The more their view gets adopted and even embedded in law, the more likely it seems to me that someone with power will get quite serious about questioning whether just maybe the state should make sure there are not even "better" parents for that newborn than the biological mom and dad. Apart from holding that there is a natural right for parents to raise their children, and for children to be raised by their parents, I just dont know how else to explain why that newborn going home with it's mom and dad is best.

The rejection of Natural Law in Protestant circles is a modern phenomena. Fideism and presuppositionalism had almost no place in the Reformation tradition prior to the 20th Century.

I think that's about right, and it's really a thing with certain types of low church groups that have held onto doctrinal orthodoxy in spite of modern trends all things considered. The rise of "evangelical" churches has been hard for Protestantism because many of them reject the old Protestant traditions as much as they reject Catholicism, which is why you can see some outrageously nutty theology in many "evangelical churches." One common trend is the trope "Jesus is all that matters" sort of thinking. I've seen plenty that also downplay the importance of most of the Bible itself because of that. A lot of those churches should play Personal Jesus in their worship service as a warning to newcomers...

Apart from holding that there is a natural right for parents to raise their children, and for children to be raised by their parents, I just dont know how else to explain why that newborn going home with it's mom and dad is best.

Perhaps fortunately for that future state of affairs of "someone with power" getting antsy about "letting" parents take their child home from the hospital, it is entirely possible to have a child not in a hospital at all. As happened "naturally" for quite some number of years before the 20th century.

DR84, you are right that some things ought to be (and, properly) are so manifest and basic that trying to "explain" them by something more basic just isn't really in the cards. If a person has been so deformed mentally by their mal-formed "family" situation when they were raised that they just don't "get" it, they probably aren't going to "get" it by argument. Nevertheless, we who do grasp the normalcy of the norm have to be thinking about making our case, NOW, in other ways than argument. In stories, in tropes, in slogans that borrow from these stories, in sentiment and feeling and "just obvious" ways of assuming into the space of the discussion things that, later, may be under attack by argument. This is, after all, exactly the way the gays beat us on that issue. Somewhere in the late 20th century, they abandoned all pretense at arguing the case, and simply re-routed the campaign on other levels and modes, (like TV shows), appealing to sensibilities and feelings instead of to reason because there was no way they were ever going to win the argument by reason. And we have to attack - not just by reason but in other ways - the similarly unrational nonsense of the left in trying to assume into the space of national discussion what is contrary to the norm. This is one reason why I won't let my kids watch TV shows that normalize divorce or single-parenthood. They can't be suborned into feeling (not thinking) this is one shade of "normal" if they don't even see it. But we have to go further than that, and figure out successful ways to defuse such deformities of true norms that are conveyed by TV and other media.

"Is there anything amiss to just saying that it is a basic truth, or inherent good for one to have a relationship with their biological parents?"

If one says it *in those words*, then it can be counterexampled *in specific cases*. For example, knowing what I now know, I don't think it would have been inherently good for me to have had a relationship with my own biological father, given who he was and what he was like.

There's a tendency to throw around the word "nominalism," but in this case I really do think the problem in communicating the relevant truths is a problem of nominalism. What we want to communicate is something about the _type_. Namely, that _as a type_ of grouping, the biological father-mother pair is the best grouping, is a kind of Platonic ideal, of who is "supposed to" raise the child. This does not mean that every _token_ of the pair of biological mother and father is the best context to raise a child. One of the most important questions there for policy is the question of whether the biological parents are married or not. (My biological parents were not.)

Similarly (not to open a can of worms) when we talk about sexuality, when we say that certain acts are natural and other acts are not, and we relate this to procreation, the homosexuals will come running right in and talking about infertile heterosexual couples, heterosexual couples in which the woman is too old to conceive, and so forth, and triumphantly say that we are somehow hypocrites for connecting sexual naturalness _in any way at all_ with procreation. This, again, trades on a kind of nominalism. The idea is that there is no such thing as a _type_ of act that has any relevance to morality. The answer, of course, is that we are talking about a _type_ of act and that a heterosexual couple of fifty-five years of age can engage in the _type_ of act, but homosexuals never can (with one another).

Right, for example, it seems obvious to me it is better to be raised by adoptive parents than abusive biological parents. I don't see how this refutes the platonic ideal or type of mom-dad-kids. It seems to me that the abusive or neglecteful biological is a corruption of the ideal.

I have joked about this a bit already, but are we just witnessing the death of a norm or are we also witnessing the birth of a new norm? Obviously not a true norm, but rather a percieved to be true norm. It seems like there is a vacuum created here that is going to be filled by something.

I fear that what is going to replace it is the idea that it's normal for the state to be continually intervening and treating children as wards thereof prima facie.

I read a story last week about a single woman with a newborn in England who lives with her mother. She was the focus of an attempted kidnapping of the baby by two teenage girls who set up a fake Facebook page. One of them eventually wangled her address and came to her house pretending to be a social worker. The would-be kidnapper said that the unwed mother signed a form in the hospital authorizing them to take the baby away for a well-child checkup. The mother was suspicious and said she was sure she hadn't signed such a form. She called social services and was told that they hadn't sent anyone.

In being interviewed, the unwed mother made an interesting statement. She said something about how easy it would have been for it to have succeeded because (words to the effect), "When you're a new mother in the first couple of weeks you're used to having people in authority come to your house."

Telling, wasn't it?

I fear that what is going to replace it is the idea that it's normal for the state to be continually intervening and treating children as wards thereof prima facie.

Modern people are often terrified of individual, non-state authority. Many women are terrified of a husband having actual authority over them in their marriage in the traditional sense. Men are afraid of having to submit to other spheres of authority when it's inconvenient or undesirable. Both men and women alike are uncomfortable with the notion of parents having superior ordinary authority over children than society and the state. The list goes on and on, and so people turn to the state to free them from being shackled to human authority in most spheres of authority. Then they look on, incredulously, when they have created a totalitarian state in the literal sense.

A totalitarian state at its core is the supreme, all-encompassing state. It doesn't matter how you arrive them, just that you did. If you arrived there unintentionally, then your ideology is rubbish on its face.

"I fear that what is going to replace it is the idea that it's normal for the state to be continually intervening and treating children as wards thereof prima facie"

I believe Scotland's Named Person act may just be exactly this. In some ways, the Named Person may even have more authority over the child than the parent's do. I am also concerned that this sort of thing will spread elsewhere (I'm mostly expecting it to). I do not have children yet, but I cannot imagine a government person being assigned to me and my children who would show up to supervise things and just make sure everything is "ok". I would want to tell that person to take a hike, and I would be afraid that any such expression...even the least bit of standoffishness with them...would be exactly the pretense needed to have the children taken.

In some ways, the Named Person may even have more authority over the child than the parent's do.

Yes, I have read that the Named Person gets a report if the child gets birth control from a medical provider. But the parents don't.

By the way, many U.S. states _already_ have laws that say that minors can receive STD treatment and birth control without parental knowledge. The child may be on the parents' insurance plan (in fact, usually would be), but neither the insurance company nor the medical provider is permitted, without the child's express permission, to tell the parent if these treatments and services were received. The child has a statutory "right to privacy" in this area, though not generally in medical treatment. Since the child has a right to private sexual counseling, the medical service provider is supposed to make this known to the child in some way. Some are more tactful than others. In one instance in my own state, the people at the doctor's office attempted to _require_ a mother to leave her daughter alone for private counseling in this area, though the daughter was not requesting it. Eventually that doctor's office backed down. The more tactful way is, at a "well-child visit" where the parent is present, for the medical provider simply to say something to the minor like, "If you have any other questions, you can always get in touch with me." I suppose it could be worse.

We don't yet have a Named Person in the U.S. who has the right to all of this information that is so conspicuously withheld from the parents, but the very act of conspicuously withholding it from the parent and keeping it "between the medical provider and the child" is itself ironically a step in the direction of _eroding_ the child's privacy and providing just such a person. After all, aren't the medical people sort of being moved into that role already?

I knew that medical people often did in fact keep such information from parents (here in the US). I did not know that there was a legal right to do this. Surely it varies from state to state? This seems like a terrible place for a child to be at risk of abuse (by a doctor, or teacher, for example) and seems like a matter that is ripe for successful push-back by the pro-life movement. Even if you grant (which I don't, of course) some notional need (or "right") for a "mature child" of 15 or 16 to get birth control without having to run the risk of parental shock and refusal, surely we can push on the reality that such chemicals have multiple side effects and cascades of "involvement" in other areas that cannot plausibly be managed WELL without parental knowledge and support. Is there any age limit that the medical profession is allowed (or required) to say "sorry, that's too young even for us to pretend it is OK to ignore the parental role here"? If not, that too should be an avenue of attack.

In reality, giving ANY medical treatment on an ongoing basis as life-invasive as the pill to a child, without being able to rely on and involve the parent, should have to be considered so risky as, for all intents and purposes, to imply taking the child out of the parent's hands, to imply requiring a court-ordered emancipation of the child from the parents. Which, of course, could ONLY be justified by abuse or grave neglect, not something as imaginary a cause as "I am afraid they won't like it when I ask for the pill".

Tony, I _believe_ there is a fairly standard age at which this targeted legal "right to privacy" kicks in. Looks like about 12-14. I don't know how much it varies from state to state, but it's pretty widespread. Conservative groups are unhappy about it, but I've not seen any concerted attempt to push back against it legally. Maybe I just haven't heard.

This is a chart from Guttmacher.

https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/spibs/spib_OMCL.pdf

It looks like an asterisk after the word in the column means that the doctor _may_ inform the minor's parents. Presumably that means that if there is no asterisk, the doctor _may not_ inform the minor's parents.

I wonder if this could be extended to the controversy over whether disabled people should have children when the disability is genetically transferred. Consider the deaf community, for example. There was a case where a girl was disowned by her deaf friends and relations for getting a hearing aid. She recognized that there was a norm when it came to hearing and that she should try to follow it. She saw her deafness as the privation that it was. But I've found that if you even tentatively suggest that people with severe genetic anomalies shouldn't pass those down, you get the most vile comparisons thrown your way, almost as if you'd suggested aborting disabled children in the womb.

But I've found that if you even tentatively suggest that people with severe genetic anomalies shouldn't pass those down, you get the most vile comparisons thrown your way, almost as if you'd suggested aborting disabled children in the womb.

We have the closest thing to President Camacho we've ever seen running for office and you're worried about a few genetic lottery losers having kids?

Mike T., bag it with the blatant threadjack. ME's comment was relevant to this thread. Yours isn't. Actually, what M.E. says about "the deaf community" is quite true. There is a _strong_ idea there that being deaf is actually _not_ a privation, is a good thing, that it's another way of being and possibly even superior to being able to hear. It's turned into a huge identity politics thing, especially at "traditionally deaf" institutions. By my recollection, a pair of lesbians deliberately _selected_ an IVF embryo _for_ being deaf (thus killing off the child's siblings from the petri dish).

When we have a deaf girl being ostracized for getting a hearing aid, we have a _major_ problem with the concept of a norm.

Mike T., bag it with the blatant threadjack. ME's comment was relevant to this thread. Yours isn't

My comment was as relevant as the section of ME's that I quoted. My response was a sarcastic one that sure, you'll never consider telling people with low IQs they shouldn't reproduce, but you'll tell the deaf that they should be celibate.

Actually, what M.E. says about "the deaf community" is quite true.

And not relevant to what I responded to.

Who said that the deaf should be celibate? Silly rabbit, non sequiturs are for kids!

No, having a somewhat "low IQ" is not a privation in the same sense that, say, having cystic fibrosis is. It's part of the confusion of the concept of a norm that, the minute one starts talking about what constitutes a genuine privation, we're off into full-blown eugenics territory. Not _everything_ that is not smack in the middle of the bell curve constitutes a privation. Moreover, privation can come in degrees. For that matter, if someone is highly intelligent and is an Aspie he may have a privation while a person with an IQ of 90 may be much more normal in the sense of "doing just fine." Yes, there are fuzzy lines to these things, but not everything is the same.

We really do live in an age now where one is automatically considered a eugenicist if one considers a person with a truly severe genetic anomaly--we're talking a severe, life-threatening disease that all his children are virtually guaranteed to get, hereditary blindness, deafness, or Down Syndrome, to name a few undeniable privation examples--and if one suggests that perhaps this person should not marry. Is it a matter of prudence rather than a knock-down matter? Yes, it is. But it's a matter worth considering. I certainly question the happy welcoming of marriage between two people with Down Syndrome. One has to ask whether they are capable of consent, for example, and hence of contracting a valid marriage at all, depending upon mental age, much less caring for themselves and any children they may have. Yet my anti-eugenicist creds are about as strong as they get. Within these communities there is definitely an idea that one isn't supposed to talk about the issue as a privation at all.

I definitely don't hold that the deaf should in general be celibate. But if you _knew for sure_ that you would conceive deaf children, then it would be legitimate to throw that in the mix as one consideration as to whether or not to marry. (Empirically, I doubt that there are conditions of deafness that give such a high probability to having a deaf child. After all, the deaf lesbians I talked about above had to _select_ for a deaf child, so it wasn't guaranteed by any means, even though I believe one of them was the biological mother of all the children conceived.)

I didn't say more because I didn't know whether Lydia wanted to allow the thread to continue in that direction. With her response, I will.

Mike, deaf people should of course be allowed to marry and reproduce. They know what their kids are getting into, and can accept it with open eyes, just as I know what my kids are getting into with our foibles and problems, and yet am willing to bring them into the world. The problem only lies in seeing deafness as a positive good instead of a privation.

If you're recommending that we tell low-IQ people that they shouldn't reproduce, I suggest you re-evaluate where the value of a person comes from. (I'll use "low-intelligence" instead of "low-IQ" because I know too many idiots who test well to trust IQ scores.) We don't have a problem with too many low-intelligence people around; many low-intelligence people do (as Lydia says) "get along just fine", and they have for millenia. Where we have problems, it seems to me that they're often related to low-intelligence people being given the expectation that they'll be able to do everything that high-IQ people should do, with them being treated like inferiors in a culture that treats "intelligence" as measured in specific ways as the highest good, and with their resulting lack of success, disconnect from reality, and defensiveness -- not to mention the political consequences of relatively low-intelligence people voting in large numbers.

Note that this is a problem regarding societal norms (remember norms? It's a song about norms). For all that Lydia's original post is about the death of norms, societies can't exist without them. They just get more and more screwed up as we try to avoid them. So, for example, there are norms that would be fine for people with relatively high intelligence -- get a degree, make a relatively large amount of money working for the man, spend a lot on relatively luxurious vacations (e.g., going to Disney) and other such things, retire. For large swaths of people, those things are hard to do, and they really shouldn't be expected to.

If you're recommending that we tell low-IQ people that they shouldn't reproduce, I suggest you re-evaluate where the value of a person comes from.

I'm not recommending anything. My comment was a snide remark along the lines of sure, we're facing a bit of Idiocracy coming to life and this is what you are concerned about in terms of who should be having kids?

Mike, I think you are just misunderstanding where all of this is coming from. My understanding is that ME was pointing out, connected with the points I made in the main post (remember the main post?) a further implication of the idea that there are no such things as privations, only being "differently abled." If there _are_ such things as privations, including _severe_ privations, real disabilities, and if such severe disabilities are not positive goods or just "different ways of being," then it would be a perfectly legitimate consideration of *prudence* for a person voluntarily to ask himself whether he should marry and have children if he is *highly likely* to have a child with a *severe or even life-threatening disability*. And, in the case of people such as those with Down Syndrome, as I pointed out, the question of valid consent also arises when marriage is in view. I've tried to explain these things to you and their relationship to the main post, but you still don't get it, so, y'know, at this point I don't much care whether you understand or not. Please stop just trying to get in your little last, grumpy, still-not-getting-it word. It's silly. Stop it.

But I've found that if you even tentatively suggest that people with severe genetic anomalies shouldn't pass those down, you get the most vile comparisons thrown your way, almost as if you'd suggested aborting disabled children in the womb.

As written, that can be quite easily read as suggesting that a deaf person simply should not take a risk of passing on the gene for deafness. I have only heard of, but never met, anyone so politically correct that they would agree that the "deaf community" has a moral right to deliberately conceive children who are deaf by choosing circumstances where the gene is highly likely to manifest.

I've tried to explain these things to you and their relationship to the main post, but you still don't get it

I actually do get it, I just don't agree with you. I don't think deafness is a big enough privation to suggest that someone should consider not having children. Do bear in mind, that I was responding to ME, not what you wrote in response to ME when adding cases like Down's Syndrome.

The issue of prudence here is rather difficult when you consider the whole spectrum of potential serious privations, particularly with mental illness. Mental illness often skips a generation. It's possible to be normal yourself, but risk having your kids inherit the illness (such as severe depression) that afflicted your parents.

That's why the threshold for going there must be either necessarily high or in cases where the person is deliberately trying to pass on the gene (ex: the deaf communities, not the deaf people who recognize the privation and choose a spouse with hearing so they can at least roll the dice)

That's why the threshold for going there must be either necessarily high or in cases where the person is deliberately trying to pass on the gene (ex: the deaf communities, not the deaf people who recognize the privation and choose a spouse with hearing so they can at least roll the dice)

Oh, heck, I'm going to throw some gasoline on the embers. But as a pre-emptive defense: I have seen cases where something needed to be done.

What cases? I am thinking, specifically, of people of low, low intelligence, who are about to marry another person of low, low intelligence, and you can pretty well forecast grave problems down the road. I am not referring, though, to slightly low intelligence, but the kind of intelligence where the person already has a lot of trouble maneuvering ordinary life. A lot. A person who already you see depends an awful lot on others around him to fix his mistakes and problems, to steer him out of holes. A person who cannot really be called "independent" in any rational sense. Multiply that by two for the prospective spouse.

I am in no way saying that there "ought to be a law" about it. But surely there is a range of low intelligence where friends and family have a positive duty to step in and say: "this is a really bad idea". Intelligence is a range sort of thing, and there are surely people of low intelligence who are just fine getting married. Plenty. My point is that there are also, surely, people below that who are in a kind of gray area, and for whom it depends greatly on individual factors (including prospective spouse, community conditions, etc). And there is, surely, a range BELOW the gray area, where you can pretty much be morally certain that the proposed marriage is an awful idea. My point is that if the whole topic is a taboo subject, then you have thereby forbidden family and friends, the people who most love this person and who are most capable of having an influence on him WITHOUT involving "authorities", from protecting the guy or girl from tripping over their own low intelligence in a matter of gravity. In a sane society, we would expect people to be able to advise those whose intelligence is so low not to marry, that their vocation lies elsewise.

The reason that these topics are taboo is that our society has no concept of

a) sensible familial discussion and societal discussion apart from laws

b) a norm that isn't hateful.

Believe me, there are _plenty_ of people out there who would be hateful about this. Hatefulness exists. If the Internet has taught me one thing about society, it's that. In my impervious graduate school days, before the Internet existed in anything like the form we have it today (yes, I'm that old), I would have scoffed at the idea that bigotry of the, "Die, you !@$$ r*t*rd!" sort existed anywhere except on some "fringe that nobody listens to." And the same with a lot of other actual despicable hate, threats, etc. Now I know better.

Combine that with the quiet, liberal, squeaky-clean attempts to eradicate whole groups of people through selective search-and-destroy abortion and real proposals in journals that couples should be _required_ to use IVF to reproduce so that they can eugenically destroy "defective" embryos, and you have the upshot that hateful, murderous responses to disability are alive and well in the West in 2016.

Partly in response and reaction to that, and partly as a form of PC all its own, both the left and the right have developed their own distorted _positive_ ideas about disability--that it is not a disability at all, that it's another "community," that it shouldn't stop you from doing anything whatsoever, including getting married, and so forth.

As M.E. mentioned above, you get absurdities such as deaf people getting "in trouble" among their friends, who may be most or all of their friends (since they are encouraged to be embedded in "the community") for getting a hearing aid. Even using the word "disability" is considered wrong.

And you get a lot of sentimentality among those who really mean well: Isn't it sweet and wonderful that this Down Syndrome person is a member of the legislature? (That's a real example, by the way, though I can't remember the country.) Plus marriages among people who literally cannot care for themselves at all.

We have lost the nexus of compassion, humanity, and moral uprightness combined with a realistic recognition of disability and its implications and a way of expressing the latter through normal social channels.

Amen to that, Lydia. When we lose norms for what it is to be human, we also lose moral norms that enable us to operate reasonably. Thus the nutty "isn't it sweet" stuff, instead of "that's insane!" And a lot of other reactions that make no sense.

This is a an incredibly good statement from the American College of Pediatricians on gender issues in children. It should be held up as a template on how to speak truth in these times. No dancing around the issue, no "I'm sorry, but." Just straight up it's a mental illness and you are a very bad person if you refuse to recognize that this is a bona fide mental illness and treat it instead like a personal quirk to be indulged.

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