Opus Cartoon about Lesbian Moms Stirs Writers’ Wrath

This cartoon, published Sunday by Berkeley Breathed in the Washington Post and elsewhere, shows two boys discussing a third, who has two moms. After one says it’s “cool,” the other says “Makes you wonder how he’ll do without a male role model in the house.” At this moment, a television comes flying out the window and an unshaven man holding a beer can leans out and curses at the baseball game he was watching.

At least two conservative writers [updated based on Sacks’ statement that he doesn’t consider himself a conservative], Glenn Sacks of the American Chronicle and Jennifer Roback Morse of Town Hall, have interpreted Breathed as being anti-dad and saying that all fathers are bad role models. Sacks links the cartoon to two books by feminist academics, Rosanna Hertz’s Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice (which I reviewed here) and Peggy Drexler’s Raising Boys Without Men (which I reviewed here; didn’t like her methodology, but admired her intent). He sees all three as sending the message “that kids don’t need fathers, that moms are better than dads, and that having two moms is better than having a mom and a dad.” Despite this, he claims to “support the rights of gays and lesbians to live their lives as they choose.”

Morse goes further, and says the cartoon is “unadulterated, unapologetic male-bashing,” and “a sickening foretaste of what awaits us as same sex parenting becomes normalized.” I’m not sure how supporting same-sex parenting, which includes families that have two—count ’em, two—dads, counts as male-bashing. Morse tries to claim that same-sex parenting is a move towards making moms and dads interchangeable, and when this happens, dads will be discarded because “the connection between fathers and children is intrinsically more tenuous than the bond between mothers and children.” This of course leads right into her assertion that “The social purpose of marriage is to strengthen the attachment of fathers to their children” (which raises the question of whether opposite-sex couples should be required to procreate in order to maintain their marital status.)

Let’s review: Only 23% of families in this country are married mom-dad couples with children, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. While there are families among that 77% who are not doing well, it is nowhere near all of them, or our society would be in a lot worse shape than it is. The lack of non-traditional families isn’t a crisis; it is a reality. Families with just moms, just dads, or just one parent, are on the whole doing just fine. This is Hertz and Drexler’s point; not that society no longer has a need for dads.

Hertz even stresses that the women in her study are not trying to create a society without men. Even the lesbian moms wanted men in their children’s lives. She also hypothesizes that as fathers try to find their place in today’s world, they may make more of an effort to be active players in their children’s lives, trying to bring something to the table other than genetic material (which reproductive technology may make unnecessary) or outdated gender roles.

Breathed’s point, as I see it, is that gender alone doesn’t necessarily make one a good parent. Simply having a man around is no guarantee he will be an appropriate role model. Breathed would probably say the same about women and gay dads. Yes, he chose to make the cartoon about lesbian moms, with a male figure as the foil, when he could have done the reverse. (Imagine a woman leaning out the window with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, in curlers and a low-cut top, cursing about a cheesy reality show.) Why did he do it this way? Blame Mary Cheney and the current buzz she’s created (intentionally or not) about lesbian moms.

Maybe Morse is just upset at the positive portrayal of Opus the Penguin in Breathed’s work. Everyone knows penguins have homosexual tendencies.