Sir: Perhaps Ian Richards is right (May 26). Perhaps people
who enjoy looking after children are just as selfish as people who like looking after number one. Perhaps a really unselfish person is a logical absurdity. None of this affects my argument that people with families to support need to earn more money than people without such responsibilities, and that employers who help them to do So cannot reasonably be accused of victimising homosexuals, the unmarried, or anyone else.
Mr Richards' reference to the minority of single people with elderly dependants is the merest quibble. Old people have savings, property — at the very least state pensions. They do not require to be educated, or grow out of their clothes every six months. And if the burden of looking after them grows too heavy it can, without disgrace, be passed on to the State.
Children are indeed a kind of insurance, not only for their parents but for society. Mr Richards is (of course) worried about over-population. But if he wants his old age to be half-way bearable he should pray that the present generation of parents produces too many children rather than too few.
I would not oppose any reform which would make life easier for the homosexual without encroaching on the rights of heterosexuals (which include, by the way, the right to pick their own friends, and avoid the company of people with whom they cannot be at ease). What I say is no more than this — that, even as things are, homosexuals are not nearly as hard
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