I have a bone to pick with Recorder columnist John Huer. Actually, it’s a whole skeleton. Usually, I take a nausea pill after reading his pompous platitudes and enduring his unabated Calvinism of doomed gloom full of disappointing humans. His piece on dogs and men borders on pornography as defied in the James Joyce’s Ulysses case, where judges deemed Joyce’s novel not pornographic, lacking pornography’s main attribute: “having no redeeming social value.”
Huer’s column “Of Dogs and Men” [Recorder, May 18] meets the criteria admirably, lacking “redeeming social value” in its vicious flippancy. He writes, “A disturbing question: Do we love our dogs more than our children? In answering this question,we notice that perhaps dogs have a slight advantage because of the different ways we end up with dogs and children: We normally get our dogs quite as a deliberate decision of love and affection; but the way we get our children is actually quite casual, mostly as byproducts of accidental and even careless passion.”
To call children “byproducts” and attack mothers and fathers is truly outrageous, an insidious slap in the face of mothers and fathers who lovingly plan the births of our daughters and son, not to mention the millions of women who responsibly use birth control. I wonder, too, if he has ever met couples undergoing in vitro procedures, agonizingly painful for the woman. Contrary to Huer’s oblivion, there’s a meticulous commitment.
I do not understand why the Recorder allows this pompous pontificator to spew his venom. With all the gifted writers in the area, can’t you find a more morally responsible columnist?
Ernie Brill
Greenfield