October 7 2002

ARTICLE TOOLS

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A recent Washington Post Magazine feature recounted the tale of Gauvin Hughes McCullough and his deaf parents: Sharon Duchesneau, his birth mother, and Candace McCullough, his adoptive mother.

The article ignited a controversy, not so much because Gauvin has two mommies—sadly, that's hardly news anymore—but because Duchesneau and McCullough went out of their way to see that their child had what most people would consider a serious disability. The pair recruited a deaf friend as a sperm donor in the hope their son would be born deaf.

Several months after Gauvin's birth, an audiologist confirmed the "good" news: The baby was indeed deaf. The mothers were elated.

Why would parents, especially ones who have themselves experienced the challenges of being deaf, wish this condition on their child? After all, Gauvin already faces challenges aplenty simply because he'll grow up in a lesbian household.

The answer lies in the way that many deaf people (and others with disabilities) view themselves. Increasingly, they see deafness with a capital D—not as a disability but as a culture. They regard treatments for deafness, such as Cochlear implants, as a kind of cultural genocide.

Turning disabilities into culture may seem absurd, but the story of Gauvin Hughes McCullough is merely the reductio ad absurdum of the worldviews that define our age. These worldviews, collectively known as postmodernism, deny that truth corresponds to reality. Truth is simply one's subjective preference. But if reality is essentially unknowable, how do individuals make sense of the world?

Certainly not by recourse to universally applicable ideas about good and evil and about the meaning of human existence. Instead, the sources for what one sociologist calls the "webs ...