THE MESSAGE from Wednesday's High Court judgment in a case in which a father failed to acquire legal standing in the life of his child has a very simple message for Irish men: stop playing pseudo-liberal games calculated to crush your spirit and enable your flesh-and-blood to be stolen, writes John Waters.
There is a need here to identify two distinct languages in which this matter may be discussed: on the one hand the Kafkaesque language of family law, with its "de facto families", "access", and "sperm donors", and, on the other, the language of creation and the natural order of things.
The evidence of pseudo-liberal game-playing is manifest in the facts of the case.
The man, a gay acquaintance of a lesbian couple, agreed to donate his sperm to one of the women, resulting in the birth of a boy, now almost two years old. The couple said they had set out clearly to the man that he would have no parenting role and that they and the child would form a family unit, with his role being that of "favourite uncle". A contract to this effect was signed in September 2005.
The couple informed the court that they had intended the child to know who his biological father was and were prepared for him to have contact with the father at an "age-appropriate" time. Relations deteriorated because the couple felt the father was intruding on their family life.
The judge said he was "driven to the conclusion that the applicant misled the respondents as to the role which he saw himself playing in any child's life". (It is also possible that the man was slain in the spirit on seeing his own flesh and blood.)
The judge ruled broadly in accordance with the evidence of a witness psychiatrist who advised that the father should not have any role that could disrupt the child's family life with the lesbian couple.
In rejecting the man's case and refusing him guardianship and access rights, Mr Justice Hedigan said the welfare of the child was best served by his remaining with the lesbian couple. There was nothing in Irish law, he said, to suggest a family of two women and a child "has any lesser right to be recognised as a de facto family than a family composed of a man and woman unmarried to each other and a child".
Here, of course, the judge was absolutely correct. For much of the past two decades, I and others have been drawing attention to the treatment of fatherhood in Irish law, society and culture. The media has heaped disdain and abuse in the direction of such advocacy, and the political class, to a man, has averted its gaze. Now the same politicians bend over backwards to extend "equality" to homosexuals, to rousing cheers from the media gallery.
Mr Justice Hedigan said the rights of a man who acted as a sperm donor were at least no greater than those of an unmarried father. My translation: they are negligible. Fathers, not being listed victims, are outside the loop of the liberal patronage essential to anyone seeking full membership of this society. It is interesting that the man in this case is himself homosexual, but male homosexuals come below lesbians in the liberal pecking order.
At the heart of this case is the agreement signed by the father, purporting to waive most of his natural claims in favour of "uncle" status. Of course, it is morally impossible for a father to do this.
We need to be clear that what has happened in this case is that a man's child has been, in the language of creation, stolen. The fact that he colluded in this wrongdoing is beside the point.
The judge said that the "blood link" was of little weight and not a determining factor in the case, which is to acknowledge that nature no longer has any automatic purchase in Irish law.
Drunk with liberal hubris, have we reinvented the wheel of life, deciding that two lesbians playing House can trump the claims of the forces that create human life?
Where a lesbian couple live together in a long-term committed relationship, declared the judge, they can be regarded as constituting a de facto family enjoying family rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The father had no such rights.
The judge noted that the absence of provisions in Irish law to secure the rights of same-sex couples under Article 8 "seems something that calls for urgent consideration by the legislature".
He did not venture an opinion as to whether the mutual rights of fathers and children might be secured. He did, however, and I am not making this up - suggest that the State might look at clarifying the situation in respect of succession rights between child and biological father. Actually, you couldn't make it up.