I don’t like much of what Margaret Court has been saying lately, but my earlier blog predicted the reaction to it (21/9/2016.) You can’t express an opinion on some subjects without invoking a fury of indignation and reprisals. Her opinions are out of the mainstream now but they were well inside the mainstream when she was a champion tennis player. I applaud her for sticking her neck out.

In this world, people have beliefs based on what they have been taught or grown up with. Other people have newer, more fashionable ideas. Who’s right? Are we making progress or going around in circles? Once we took half-caste children from their mothers and took children from their unmarried mothers. We thought it right then, but we think it wrong now no matter how unsuitable the parents prove to be.

It’s a very strange world today in many ways. In recent times you have seen the anguish of victims of molestation at the hands of Catholic clergy and other institutional abuse – young people put into harms way by the institutions that were supposed to protect them. But if someone would now question the right of gay couples to adopt children they would be hounded down as homophobic! They would be the worst kind of bigoted, narrow minded, reactionary troglodytes.

Recently my employer’s homepage was actively promoting a gay male couple who were raising a pair of boys. Of course, a pair of loving gay men can raise two boys without harming them, but then we once thought that priests were beyond reproach, too.

Today, people have the right to live their lives fairly freely without the law interfering. Consenting adults can do anything, which is the way it should be. But children, who gives consent for them? Why is it always children that we choose to experiment with?