The post was about a debate on family between a Catholic archbishop and a professor of biology. The archbishop had argued against gay marriage on the grounds that it meant accepting that fathers or mothers were unnecessary within a family:
What will happen to children growing up in a world where the law teaches them that moms and dads are interchangeable and therefore unnecessary...
How did the professor, P.Z. Myers, respond? With this:
I think a world where moms and dads are interchangeable in their roles and responsibilities in child-raising would be a fine place to live. Aside from nursing (and again, biologists will fix that someday, too), men and women can change diapers, attend PTA meetings, play ball, give hugs, cook, and read bedtime stories equally well...
Professor Myers presents himself as a voice of secular liberal reason. He is an academic who writes a well-read blog. And yet he approves of interchangeability between the sexes to the degree that he wants his fellow biologists to "fix" things so that men will breastfeed babies.
I'm glad that I'm still startled by such expressions of liberal modernity. It's not a mindset I ever want to inhabit.
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