Catholic commentator discusses 'genderless child'

Washington D.C., May 26, 2011 / 12:52 pm

Andrew Haines, president of the Center for Morality in Public Life, recently discussed a Canadian couple's refusal to publicly disclose the gender of their four-month-old baby.

In his column, Haines writes:

I’m frankly surprised this has garnered so much attention. But it has, and it probably should.

Very recently, a Toronto, Ontario couple—Kathy Witterick and David Stocker—made local news by refusing to disclose publicly the gender of their 4-month-old child, Storm. What’s the reason for the cover-up? “We've decided not to share Storm’s sex for now,” said the parents, “a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place? ...).”

Haines, who is also a doctoral student in Philosophy at the Catholic University of American further explains:

What’s really surprising about all this is that criticism of Witterick and Stocker’s decision is being registered across the board. It’s not surprising that social conservatives would disagree with gender-neutrality. But social liberals, and even those who support theories of social evolution, have lambasted the stunt as a “bizarre lab experiment” that flies in the face of natural history. Rather than critiquing the damage done to a child by withholding gender identity, social evolutionists believe that critical models, or scripts, will suffer if such a situation becomes widespread.

Either way, the isolated case of an overly-zealous Canadian couple gives good cause to reflect on the bigger question: what’s in a gender?

The column can be found: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/column.php?n=1597