Friday Follow-through

Gay elephant disappoints its owners! Politicians in Poland are complaining that the breeding programme is an expensive failure after Ninio has shown little interest in females, preferring boy time! (@DailyMail)

Librarians fumble classification of famous archaeology text: Prof Stringer's important book, Homo Britannicus was incorrectly shelved in the LGBT/queer section! (@DailyMail)

Queerty has a fascinating article on Jesus as a Gay Man based on a new book by Kittredge Cherry - what a fabulous name for an author, and she is a lesbian, too!

Bilerico moves the debate towards racism after the writer remembered being called someone's 'perfect little geisha boy', meant as an affectionate term, but brought up the wrong sort of feelings in Jason Tseng.

Women are finding less satisfaction with their career than men - they are preferring to have a happy home life, whereas their male counterparts are prioritising their employment prospects. (@DailyMail)

Happily childfree woman has had to reconsider her opinion now that she has a puppy in her life messing up her hormones! (@DailyMail)

Google founder's wife has produced a product (with the help of her organisations) that allows a person to be genetically tested for tell-tale mutated genes, etc. that might signal a predisposition to getting certain diseases. Both Sergey Brin and his wife, Ann Wojcicki, and their child have been tested; they are especially concerned about Parkinson's Disease, since there is history of it in the family.

I think this development is wonderful and I suspect that eventually it will be common practice for those wanting to procreate to ask the other person involved in the matter (that is the other person providing the genetic material) to provide their testing results before they decide to make babies together. If you have a higher risk of creating children with dreadful painful diseases, you might decide against producing offspring together. This does conflict with my distaste for abortion and euthanasia; I think all life has value and afflicted people can teach those around them so much about patience, compassion and love. However, if the choice was available before procreating (as in the movie Gattacca) then I, and I would think countless others, would want to know what they face beforehand. Not that you can ever really prepare to parent a severely disabled child. Plus, those scientists in the article are right, chance and environmental factors are not taken into account in the testing.

Would the testing go too far... with only tall, athletic, non-disabled children being created in the ideal world? I'm not sure we can avoid selection - you might not want to marry a bald fat man with coronary disease to prevent your babies being afflicted. Mothers choosing sperm donor candidates choose ones with 'best' qualities. I surely want intelligent, healthy, blonde babies...but that might say more about my ego than my desire for the 'best' children.