How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [109]
The upshot is simple. Because we can’t act normally any more, we vent our anger and bile on the sports pitch. We won’t accept rules and we will cheat our way to victory. Banning big prize money won’t stop this. Banning sport, I’m afraid, is the only way.
Sunday 15 November 2009
Call me a spoilsport but I’m glad my dad wasn’t a lesbian
When it comes to sweeping generalizations, I am the daddy. All Germans have no sense of humour, all instruction manuals are pointless, all cruise ships are ghastly, every single American is fat, all golfers are boring, and all Peugeots are driven by people you wouldn’t have round for dinner.
Of course, I’m well aware that most generalizations are nonsense. I know several very funny Germans, and Obama Barrack is actually quite skinny. But without generalizations, anecdotes would take two years, points would never get made, comedy would suffer and everyone would sound like James May: ‘Actually, 42.7 per cent of instruction manuals are quite useful; but first let me quantify “useful” …’ Life would be a terribly dreary assault course if every fact had to be precise, but, that said, generalizations have no place in serious scientific research, which is why I was a bit startled to read last week that a government adviser from the National Academy for Parenting Practitioners said lesbians made better parents than what we can no longer call ‘normal couples’.
I’m not sure this is quite right because, so far as I can remember, a woman is not able to have a child after having sexual relations with another woman. Unless that woman is from an athletics squad. In order for a lesbian couple to have had a child, either a turkey baster must have been involved – which is not how most people would like to imagine they came into the world – or they must have visited the state-sponsored British Association for Adoption and Fostering, which thinks that anyone who objects to same-sex parents is a ‘retarded homophobe’.
Happily, I’m a bit more sensible than this. I do not think that someone who objects to homosexual parents is a retarded homophobe. I believe they have an opinion. But, that said, I emphatically don’t agree that lesbians necessarily make better parents than me. It is impossible to say that someone will make a better parent because she fancies other girls. There will be some lesbians who’ll go out all night and take drugs and there will be some who’ll read a child a bedtime story and be excellent.
I have done some checking on this, and the only evidence I can find comes from research endorsed by the national academy itself. The study examined children raised by just twenty-seven single mothers, twenty lesbian couples and thirty-six, er, differently genitalled parents and concluded that those raised by women grew up with a better psychological well-being. You can’t possibly draw any conclusions after testing twenty lesbians. Test twenty Italians and you could well end up concluding the whole nation was full of calm, incorruptible dullards with no interest in sex. Test temperatures over just twenty years and you’d end up concluding the world’s climate was changing.
I like lesbians, especially proper ones in stockings that you find on the internet. Certainly, I think more women should try lesbianism. It’d be great. But on a personal note, and please don’t call me a retarded homophobe, I’m not sure I’d have been very happy if my mum had been one. I like to imagine that Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron sometimes get it on under the covers, but my mother and Peggy from the tennis club? No. And the idea that Peggy from the tennis club would have been a better dad than my actual dad is laughable. Nearly as laughable, in fact, as the alarming news that the country has a parenting academy looking into this sort of thing.
All of us think that the way we bring up our children is correct