Of course, I’m not going to have any and that’s a good thing, but one passage in this report struck me a slightly behind the scientific times:
BHARUCH: Gujarat’s gay prince of Rajpipla, Manavendrasinh Gohil, who was disinherited by the family for going public about being gay but later taken back into the fold, now wants to carry on the royal bloodline, in a manner of speaking.The gay prince, who wants to ensure the lineage does not end with him just because he can’t have children, wants to adopt a child and make him the royal heir. Manavendra hit the headlines recently by going on the Oprah Winfrey Show and proclaiming his homosexuality.
I guess I’m missing the nuance. Obviously, unless there is a physiological problem of functionality I don’t know about, he can have kids, he just doesn’t want to father them on a woman. Or do I have this story wrong? But this is a key battle in the fight for global gay rights, and I hope one of our readers in touch with the Prince will pass it along. You never can let the other side argue that gays and children can’t go together, not even in the slightest way. It’s a big part of their attack on us, too many free gays = fewer children. That’s wholly untrue.
The pressures upon all of us to conform to traditional reproductive patterns are intense, and I’m glad the Prince can show his love for tradition by bending it a little. Still, I hope that as he ages, he’ll learn that even the most backwards traditions can survive and share the stage with a little basic science. Conforming to traditional reproductive models (marriage to a woman, in this case) is what got him into trouble in the first place. I hope he learns not to give into the language of tradition which would’ve kicked him out of the Princes Club 4-evah. I credit him with having a sense of humor:
Manavendra, who is a divorcee, added that adoption was not new for the royal families as many had taken this route in the absence of a legal male heir. “The Gohil dynasty itself is a case of adoption. Rajpipla was ruled by the Parmar clan, not the Gohils. But the Parmars at one point did not have a male child. One of the Parmar princesses then married the maharaja of Bhavnagar.
Race, bloodline, royalty, patriarchy…they are all such silly notions and I am laughing at them.
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” I credit him with
” I credit him with having a sense of humor”
He’s not being funny, per se; he’s being quite traditional. Adoption used to quite common among Indian royal houses. If you didn’t have a male heir, you would pick some likely boy and adopt him. In a couple of 1700-1800 Indian states, they went 3-4 generations without a biological father-son succession. It was so common, the British East India Company developed the Doctrine of Lapse specifically to claim the right to annex territory; basically, they required inheritence by bloodline or they claimed the rulership of the state lapsed and the British would absorb it, since it obviously had no fit ruler. Several states got swallowed up this way in the mid-1800s. When Vicky dissolved the EIC, she specifically made the promise the British Crown would accept adopted heirs as legitimate (not to say the Brits wouldn’t invade and conquer for other reasons, but Lapse was dead).