More on those gay sheep and the contradictions of pro-abortion policies

Mark Steyn being Mark Steyn.

Unlike Martina Navratilova, I'm no expert in sheep sexuality. Who put the ram in the ram-a-lama-ding-dong? I couldn't tell you. But I'm always interested in the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition. If you're a farmer, a ram is an economic asset. So, if he's gay, he's useless. Back in the '80s, Jasper Conran, couturier to the princess of Wales, was said to have glanced out of his train window at some grazing Holsteins and sighed, "Black and white is so last season," an observation which (if somewhat apocryphal) helpfully distills the limitations of the gay sensibility applied to the farmyard. So, on hearing that experts have come up with a nicotine-patch-like sticker that a pregnant sheep can wear to straighten out any potential gayness in her fetus, your average farmer might well think it worth investing in.

And, if that happens, at what point will a woman's right to choose intersect with a farmer's right to ewes? Under Beijing's one-child policy, Chinese women exercised their "right to choose" the sex of their baby so radically that they now have the most gender-lopsided demographic cohort in history: millions of surplus boys for whom all the girl babies were aborted. Professor Schuklenk is right: "Homophobic societies" may well choose to de-gay their offspring. After all, much abortion practice is already explicitly eugenicist: If a woman can decide she doesn't want to carry a baby with Down syndrome or a cleft palate or because she only wanted one of the triplets, why should she be obliged to accept his orientation? Once you've redefined pregnancy in the radically individualist terms that abortion absolutists have, why should the modish pieties of political correctness prove any more effective a restraint than conventional social and religious morality? In 2005, responding to a highly hypothetical possibility of parental screening for a "gay gene," a Maine state representative introduced a bill for the protection of unborn gays. But it's hard to see why, in liberal abortion theology, unborn gays should be any worthier of protection than unborn straights.