What is natural?

Last week was gay Pride Week in Toronto. Thousands of visitors poured into the city to celebrate love and acceptance—of their children, their chosen life partners, and the people around them who insist on equal rights and tolerance for those who are born different from the usual pattern or develop differently. Human sexuality is complex and I’m not surprised to find variations in what “turns people on.” Outside narrow limits such as height, weight, coloration, or bustiness, some other people condemn the way it develops and would reject those people unless they deny their inner reality.

'WHO CARES if my MOMMIES get married?'

Meanwhile, some people have a developing fetus whose characteristics are incompatible with life or with growing up. There are groups (and web sites) dedicated to convincing us that we should accept everything that God sends us and appreciate the deformed fetus, letting it enjoy its “brief but wonderful life”—with or without a brain, a functioning heart, cancer, functional bones, or the need for multiple painful surgeries. They encourage women to disregard the emotional strain and physical danger of giving birth to such a baby, alive or dead or dying.

Conjoined twins

I wonder: why the acceptance for drastic and life-limiting birth defects and the rejection of relatively minor and common variations in forms of love