Some years ago an article in this paper headlined “The Grandparents are out” featured two families to show that “gays and lesbians who married decades ago and had children now enjoy grandkids who know their story.”  These grandparents had heterosexual marriages because they came of age in a pre-liberation era with a strong gay taboo.

     The three grandchildren of one of the families were, of course, “cool” with their grandmother’s lesbianism and indeed proud of her and her pioneering cohort.  The granddaughter of the male couple was still an infant but the proud grandfather remarked: “I think she’ll grow up with us as the norm. I want to convey the idea that it’s better to be extraordinary than normal, and to follow your bliss.”

     Given that everyone feels so good about this, is it impolitic to point out that, were it not for the gay taboo, the now properly cool grandchildren would not exist?  Indeed, had the gentleman “followed his bliss” from the get-go, i.e. if there had been no taboo in his youth, there would not be, in his words, this “supremely adorable” granddaughter to whom he could one day give his advice.

     There was no mention of this irony in the article.  So universally derided is the taboo, it is unthinkable that anyone could credit it, even feebly, with good intentions. We were not meant to read such an article and thank the taboo for seven people (three children and four grandchildren, presumably all adorable), but rather only to feel good that these people who would not otherwise exist are now correctly nonchalant in their views about homosexuality.  Yet if the gays in the article, who understandably reviled the taboo in their youth, now in their old age claim to treasure its consequences, it is hard to see how this does not redeem in some measure the taboo’s purposes.

      What is interesting about the cohort of gay grandparents is the extent to which they seem oblivious to the implications of the life they championed. The gay grandfather in the article went so far as to say: “I was predestined to be a grandfather.” Well, no. This is not only disingenuous but, according to gay orthodoxy, sacrilege.  In the liberationist view, he is, by being gay, predestined not to be a grandfather. The only thing that predestined him to paternity of any kind was to have been born in an era that discouraged open homosexuality.

      It would be impudent to ask of these people how hypothetically they might choose between their “bliss” and their children, but it is in some sense a fair question.  Happily, it didn’t come up in real life because like everyone else, they lived their life chronologically and not in retrospect.  Burdened by untenable marriages, they found themselves in an era that suddenly allowed them sexual honesty and they embraced it, no doubt viewing their children as lone joys amidst an otherwise miserable situation.

      But gays of that generation, having had it both ways, make dubious champions of gay life. They cannot, while taking joy and consolation in their grandchildren, convincingly extol the satisfactions of a lifestyle that, absent extraordinary measures, precludes the same joy and consolation in younger gay generations.

      Finally, using the exotic word “taboo” here is a kind of shorthand for “social preference”.  Unfortunately, over centuries, this rational, if psychologically simplistic, social preference gave rise to all sorts of bigotries and oppression.  Modern liberal societies have, to their credit, removed most of these evils.  In doing so, however, they have also removed, without reflection, the rational and ultimately benign foundations of that original preference, namely, that society has a definitional interest in procreation and will always prefer it to sterility; and secondly, the benefits of procreation are not only social but individual, which is to say that procreation, in and of itself, tends to make people happy.  The Inquirer article bore out both of these truths, though they were nowhere explicitly mentioned.  Such ideas are now considered taboo.