By JAMES TARANTO

THE BEST OF THE WEB TODAY

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

MONDAY, 20 JUNE 2011

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303936704576397651054902620.html?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb_h

Yesterday was Father’s Day, and the New York Times observed the occasion by publishing a story about the family of a 3-year-old boy who, for reasons we’ll explain below, we’ll identify only by his first initial, G. (For the same reason, we’re omitting the last names of the adults in the story.)

The headline is “And Baby Makes Four,” although G. has no siblings. The headline on an earlier version of the story was more specific: “An American Family–Mom, Sperm Donor, Lover, Child.”

G. lives with his mother, Carol, in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father, whom he knows as “Uncle George,” is gay and lives with a man named Dave. Carol, unmarried and now 48, asked George to donate sperm so that she could have a baby. That is how G. came into the world.

Doubtless many people will find this whole arrangement repugnant, viewing Carol’s decision to bear a child out of wedlock as selfish and based on the false notion that fathers are expendable. Ironically, they will find support on yesterday’s Times’s op-ed page, where a high school senior named Colton Wooten describes the anguish of being the product of a donor and lacking a dad:

I call myself an only child, but I could very well be one of many siblings. I could even be predisposed to some potentially devastating disease. Because I do not know what my father looks like, I could never recognize him in a crowd of people. I am sometimes overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities, by the reality that my father could be anywhere: in the neighboring lane of traffic on a Friday during rush hour, behind me in line at the bank or the pharmacy, or even changing the oil in my car after many weeks of mechanical neglect.

I am sometimes at such a petrifying loss for words or emotions that make sense that I can only feel astonished by the fact that he could be anyone.

Of course, the “nontraditional” nature of G.’s family is part of what makes the story appealing to the Times. Its editors, writers and readers enjoy feeling superior to those they imagine are judgmental rubes who are troubled by what the paper calls “the hiccupping fluidity of the family in the modern world” and who probably hate gays too. The story even includes validation from an expert:

“Some of the strictures that were used to organize society don’t fit human change and growth,” said Ann Schranz, chairwoman of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, a 10-year-old organization. “What matters to us is the health of relationships, not the form of relationships.”

And it must be said that unlike Colton Wooten, G. at least knows his father–although he doesn’t know him as his father. There are other things he doesn’t know, as the story makes clear:

At [Carol’s] apartment in Brooklyn where George . . . spends four nights each week, he checked the clock: 7:09 p.m. Wasn’t it 7:05 about 20 minutes ago?

Never had time moved so slowly. Was the clock even working?

They had tossed the ball around, chased each other, done the book about a bear. Now the dreaded bedtime video. Every night, [G.], who was 18 months old, insisted on this DVD about race cars, space ships and motorcycles, narrated by a saccharine pair named Dave and Becky. [George] found them galling. Once, while watching, he said, it made him “feel a profound despair like when I read ‘The Bell Jar.’ ” . . .

[George] regarded [G.] and his curly blond hair. “He looks just like me when I was little,” he said. “I don’t feel paternal toward him. Yet it’s odd when I look at him and I see me.” . . .

At some point, [Carol] intends to tell her son the truth. [George] worries about that moment. He never wanted to be a parent; he saw the sperm donation as a favor to a friend. He did not attend the birth or [G.’s] first birthday party. His four sisters were trying to figure out whether they were aunts. . . .

“I certainly don’t want to be the child’s parent,” he said.

When G. is old enough, Carol plans to tell him that “Uncle George” is actually his father. Fine, but will she also tell him that caring for G. causes George “a profound despair,” that George doesn’t “feel paternal toward” G. and “certainly” doesn’t “want to be the child’s parent”?

Because G. will find these things out in due course. This isn’t the 1950s anymore, when to find old newspaper stories one had to spend hours going through library stacks or microfilm reels. Unless the New York Times goes out of business and its website is shut down, this story will live forever on the Internet.

That means that as soon as G. can punch his name and his parents’ names into Google, he will be able to read the cruel things his father said about him when he was 3. So, by the way, will his school friends–and enemies. That’s why we left the names out of this column. We don’t want him to find out from us.

One may sympathize with a middle-aged woman who desperately wants to be a mother and lacks the time and options to become one in the usual way. But there is no excuse for what Carol and George have done by allowing the Times to tell their story, which is to invade their son’s privacy and compound his future emotional challenges.

Didn’t any of this occur to reporter N.R. Kleinfeld or the Times’s editors? Or are they so enamored of “alternative family structures” that an actual child who has to live with the consequences is in their minds a mere abstraction?