THE MOUTH OF BARNABY

Extract from The Australian newspaper, December 27.

"renegade Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce said he would oppose any Liberal backbench pressure for the Coalition to allow gay civil unions, mainly because it would entrench the rights of gay men and lesbians to adopt children.

"You can do what you want, but once you start coming on somebody else's rights then you've got to pull back," Senator Joyce said. "You will end up, it's just the nature of the beast, having to argue about why they are not allowed to adopt kids."

"People will say there are so many bad mothers out there and I would make a better mother, and people always look for the exception of the rule to prove their position, and in the end you have a child growing up with a father and a father or a mother and a mother."

Senator Joyce said that while people might think it was their right to have a child, it was wrong to bring up children without a father and a mother.

"You're now dealing with someone else's rights - the child's rights - and the child has the right to have what nature gives them, both a father and mother to balance themselves up psychologically, emotionally and everything," he said.

"It's asking too much of a young child to try and explain....why they have a dad and a dad not a dad and a mum."

There are so many things wrong with those words that I'm inclined to give Barnaby the benefit of the doubt knowing how afflicted he is with Foot in Mouth disease.

This is not only an insult to gay fathers and lesbian mothers who are successfully bringing up their children but show a total lack of understanding of how Australian families have changed.
There are single mothers, divorced mothers, widowed mothers, divorced fathers and widowed fathers, all bringing up children without partners.

A young child accepts its parents without question and why would a child have to explain anything? If nature has given a child same sex parents then I think the child will handle it a lot better than Barnaby.

If he thinks having a father and a mother is better then I suggest he checks the relevant government department for the child abuse statistics for the Christmas/New Year period. He then can check the whole of 2005.

As for the child's rights, they have the right to be loved, to be kept safe, to be fed and clothed, to sleep at night without fear and to have parents, same sex or other who do all of these for them.