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We Found Our Son in the Subway

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: We Found Our Son in the Subway

#171

Post by naner »

tptacek wrote: post #52

Sound reasonable to me. That judge is probably a parent. I suspect most parents understand: if we waited to be "ready", nobody would ever be a parent. Conventional parents get months and months of notice. If they're like me, they're still nowhere close to "ready". It's terrifying. But you, and these guys, and everyone else just do what we've been doing for hundreds of thousands of years.

if we waited to be "ready", nobody would ever be a parent.

Pretty much all of my friends who have kids planned it out based on specific milestones (when we have a house, when we are making more money, when the wife is done with her residency, etc). Then 90% of the time life doesn't go as planned and milestones keep getting pushed back so they go "fuck it - we're getting old" and stop using birth control.

Re: We Found Our Son in the Subway

#172

Post by robomartin »

bwaldrep wrote: post #130
robomartin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Got me too. Beautiful story. Lots of love there. Neither my wife nor I were ready for any of our kids. I don't think you ever are. What these guys did was, among other things, down-right heroic. Not everyone would be open to changing their lives to such an extent by choice. It's also a wonderful representation of real values found in the gay community. This country will be far better off when we start to serious…

Sorry to nitpick, but these two quotes stuck out at me: > "I bet you a pile of cash not one of those self-righteous a--holes would even think about adopting a non-white kid someone found in the subway." Having known several families from the religious right who have done exactly this, I would be happy to accept your pile of cash. There, now we can let my anecdotal evidence cancel out the hasty generalization. > "This…

I am not generalizing other than to say that the hyper-religious right-wing white population has been known for being less than tolerant.

There are good people everywhere, religion has very little to do with being good and neither does sexual orientation.

Re: We Found Our Son in the Subway

#174

Post by gojomo »

lucian1900 wrote: post #133
gojomo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, the judge managed (on an ultra-compressed timescale) to provide this same-sex couple the same experience of surprise parenthood that alt-sex couples may have through an unplanned pregnancy. This principle could be advanced more systematically. That is, perhaps adoption by same-sex couples should not just be permitted , but random and compulsory . If you're married and of child-rearing age, you might be assign…

It would need an opt out, much like contraception.

OK, but with a small non-zero chance of opt-out failure.

Re: We Found Our Son in the Subway

#176

Post by unreal37 »

corin_ wrote: post #101
unreal37 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing this. The OP is a great story as well. Bureaucracy sucks more than it helps almost always.

I think that's much too simplistic a view - I don't know whether you're right or wrong, but based on the way you worded it I think you almost certainly don't either. If, without paperwork, one child was sexually abused for every one child who got adopted, would you agree that more bureaucracy was needed? Now go to the other extreme, where the bad scenario happens only once in a million and is "child gets insulted by…

I don't disagree that there is an invisible line somewhere where having process and formality is important to have. But I have the world-view that, in 2013, most legal and governmental processes have too much bureaucracy. Sure, we can't just give babies away to anyone who wants one without checking them out. But it shouldn't take years and $1000s to successfully apply to adopt one under normal circumstances. (Although heterosexual parents can breed them without such checks so it seems overly unfair.)

By its very nature bureaucracy only ever grows. It's far easier to add a new form to fill, add a new step, do a knee-jerk reaction to one bad thing that happened, add more months to the waiting list, than to analyse the monstrous process to figure out what to change or remove.

Re: We Found Our Son in the Subway

#178

Post by dasil003 »

conroe64 wrote: post #177
dasil003 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it weren't true...

Fuck off.. I've got a right to my own opinion

Why so hostile? I just thought it was a weird concept to consider something true to be corny. I'd literally never seen it used to describe anything that wasn't fiction.

Re: We Found Our Son in the Subway

#179

Post by conroe64 »

dasil003 wrote: post #178
conroe64 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuck off.. I've got a right to my own opinion

Why so hostile? I just thought it was a weird concept to consider something true to be corny. I'd literally never seen it used to describe anything that wasn't fiction.

Sorry, I didn't realize what you meant by that. I've expressed dissenting opinions on tech forums before and had some negative experiences, so I guess I was overly sensitive about it.

It was more a comment about how the story was expressed and what was said by those in it. Just as something said can be corny, a joke, a wedding proposal, etc. imo, an event can be considered corny, if there are a lot of corny things happening within it, although I'm no expert on the English language.

Re: We Found Our Son in the Subway

#180

Post by eru »

lotsofcows wrote: post #158
eru wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which society are you talking about?

Parent said, "Here in the UK". Although I think it applies to most of the first world. An interesting definition of "first world" could be "the point where native deaths outweigh native births".

OK. So what makes you think that a society only works if it grows?
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