We, that is, the society of our times, fondly believe that where human rights are concerned we have reached heights never achieved before. Truth, however, belies all this.

One matter where the double standards of our days strikingly come to the fore is that concerning adoption by same-sex couples. The key question to ask here is, of course, only one.

What is the best interest of the child when he or she is given up for adoption?

Adoption agencies are rightly very thorough and severe in their regulations concerning the eligibility of the prospective adoptive parents. They want to be sure that the child is accepted and reared in a family under the best possible conditions.

Child psychology and other related sciences are very clear on one cardinal principle, that is, the need for a child to have both a father figure and a mother figure in their lives. What the father can give and share with a child can never be given or shared with a mother and vice-versa.

Now questions to be asked to those, especially law-givers, who propose to give children to be adopted by same-sex parents are the following:

What right have they got to deprive a child from having both a mother and a father, something which, unless decreed otherwise by some tragic reality, they all have had?

What right has the law to deny a child the joy of calling a parent mummy and the other daddy?

What right has it got to inflict on a child the suffering of looking at other children, for example, during school occasions, and realise that something or rather someone is missing from his or her life and this as a result of a law?

I distinctly remember during my school-teaching days the tears in the eyes of a young girl who, during a school celebration was missing her mother who had recently died. Can a law that will inflict such suffering on the innocent be deemed just?