​Tarzan and Barbie, Tintin and Lorraine

It's all over Twitter and Facebook. This self-righteous, condescending masterpiece of sarcasm by Lorraine Badoy in reaction to an article written by Tintin Bersola Babao "On Being Gay."

It's hard to decipher what it really is. Was it a sweeping strike against journalists? Really? Does this piece of an article bordering crudeness in language critiquing some of the finest journalists too.  Or was she just bashing Tintin and the so- called expert Dr. Camille Garcia.

Was she just defending gayness or was it a vehicle to uphold what a great parent she is.

Let me dwell on some points touched by this bashing:

Parenting. This I consider, while being at the same time a most joyous role is also the most intimidating responsibility one takes.

While we try our best, who can claim to be perfect? For it's really a journey we navigate with our children. Precisely because one is so different from the other that the task becomes as daunting as it is exquisite.

And from our different backgrounds too, we bring to our parenting our own way.

In this world already so loaded with troubled kids, it seems more helpful that parents  find strength in each other. Rather than bash one another.

Oh Miss Badoy, girl, I so agree that girl toys don't make a lady nor will rough games make a man. I broke an arm swinging from one tree branch to the other playing Tarzan with my brother, and it didn't make me gay. But why such hatred and insults against a parent trying just as hard to give their children mighty, complete and full love by the way she thinks it should be done.

I can't get too hard on Tintin for the shallowness of her opinion on gender roles. I have a discomfort because segregating toys and games to be either for a girl and a boy, implicitly dictates too the society-dictated conventional roles for a man and a woman. A man puts on presentable clothes to go to work while the woman stays home to clean house, cook etc.

Well at least that is not Tintin. But I can't judge another parent for shallow perceptions, for I don't have their background. Even while I see the deeper bias in Tintin's words, she redeems herself by saying in the end that while a mother does not always agree, a mother accepts. That she does not encourage gayness is her prerogative, but the important thing is that in the end love more than gender is the more important thing.

But what really redeems her is the fact that she has a focus on her children and in her own way of parenting provides for their well- being. I say this in the light of so many children who receive no love in this world, and grow up angry and lost.

As parents, we try to put barriers to pitfalls as we perceive them. Certainly we falter in many of our perceptions and learn with our children the art of raising them and growing up ourselves. For as Ms. Badoy says they march to their own beat. This resonates  louder than our perceptions as they find and make their own destiny. But then we parents are also not always wrong, you know. Some pitfalls are pitfalls.

I'm not speaking of gayness. But then who has really fathomed what gayness is. The theories range from the ridiculous, which may have some truth you know, to the esoteric. Like boys who eat too much chicken pumped with hormones make them gay. Or that a gay man was a woman in the past life. Either way, it has to be proven whether gayness is a CHOICE or not. The cases are so diverse. Maybe it can be encouraged and discouraged. Who knows completely.

In the end while I admire the advocacies of Ms. Badoy, the anger with which she switched her opinion on Tintin's piece gives me discomfort. And more, because it incites anger among her readers. It's just the times that we live in that makes cloaking our world with anger and high-handedness just makes the world a more unpleasant place to live in.

It's incongruous to me to mix bashing with the beauty of the words of The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran, that pierce like painful arrows in the hearts of another.

Now the real worry I have is the message it sends to kids. That it's fine to go bashing people you don't even know if they don't think the way you do.

I end with Tintin's words, that we are all children of God who will judge us in the end.

And to all the gay people out there, keep spreading love and the beauty of who you are.###