Brian Dowling and Arthur Gourounlian expecting first baby.

How would you suggest the law should be worded? To stop parents posting pictures of their children. Seems like a massive over reach of the law surely, no?

I have no kids and any would never post pics of my friends kids if I was minding them, but a law? To stop someone posting pictures? How do you propose that should work?

"So what you're saying is" tends never to be a good method to start any rebuttal - let alone as a start to a cop out. Especially when the "what you're saying is" turns out to not be at all what I said but something you decided to make up and put in my mouth.

No what I am saying is that merely saying "different" says absolutely nothing. The jump from "different" to declaring what is important or a "need" or to declare that men/women are somehow incapable of doing something the other can - is just a non-sequitur. That is what the "nonsense" is. From you not me.

The "bonds" between you and your parents and me and my parents are likely much different too. Regardless of gender. We all bond with parents, friends, sibling, family, peers and coworkers in our life differently. So merely declaring there is something "different" is to say nothing at all. There is no universal there at all as if child-mother bond or child-father bond is some fixed thing that is the same across all children everywhere. Bonds to parents vary massively - indepedent of gender.

To say something of substance - which you have not - you would need to explore some relevant questions. Like: What specifically is different? How? How is the difference mentioned actually important or relevant to rearing a child? Why is the other parent specifically precluded from some aspect of bonding or parenting based on that difference?

At the end of the day I simply have seen no reason to think that there is any "need" or ideal that a child is brought up by specifically one male and one female. And when pressed for any evidence to this effect people seem to do what you just did which is declare themselves not bothered to even try before running away. You're not going to argue it because you simply can't - not because anything I said was not perfectly clear.

And the world belies your nonsense. In that - as I already said - there are any number of healthy adults who were brought up in any number of different parental configurations. If anything you were saying was true then we should be seeing some stark differentials there. But the reality is quite the opposite. We see pretty much all the same good and bad results of parenting and child upbringing regardless of the parental configuration we study.

The surrogate mother is the sister of Brian Dowling. She's probably in her house.

Your first sentence however even if true is more their problem than mine. They are the ones making the claim that one man and one woman is the "ideal" or that there is a "need" and therefore they are the ones who need to provide evidence for that claim. If the sample size for that evidence is small - they have to deal with that not me. All I can say is repeat that there appears to be no evidence on offer that any such need or ideal exists. So I do not buy any claim that declares outright there is one.

Your second sentence is just an assertion and I see nothing to support it. But even if I were to grant 100% credibility to the statement anyway then all I could say at most/best is "See paragraph 1". Same issue. It is a simple move from having no evidence for a claim to inventing excuses for having no evidence for that claim. At the end of the day the result is the same. The assertion has no evidence that this need or ideal exists.

And as I keep pointing out the real world seems to support this in that the world is punctuated by any number of people with "good" or "bad" upbringings who come from any number of parental configurations. My own children are being brought up by three parents. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. I do not however go around saying this is "better" or "worse" than any other. We can leave that to your imaginary "progressives" to make such value judgements in their culture wars. For me the only question is "Is there any reason to think a child NEEDS one man and one woman to parent them - or that they are markedly disadvantaged if they have anything but this configuration" and so far the the answer to this question appears to be a firm and clear "No".

Should any credible evidence to the contrary finally surface I will as always modify my position on the matter in response.

Sounds to me like your points are coming from an emotive place, not a logical one. (not a criticism btw, I wish more people cared about children's welfare and safety). But the same argument could be made about child TV actors/stars - People like McAuley Culkin had terrible problems stemming from their young stardom, but then others have had great careers and happy lives.

The problem with calling for laws is that they need to apply to everyone. So a law stopping this couple putting an image of their kid on social media would also apply to you and I. This is unfair and a major over reach of law.

The other odd thing about this pair and their birthing carryon is that they have spawned several click bait stories on social media. Glance down the comments of these and there are apparently dozens and dozens and dozens of fawning Irish women congratulating the new parents.

No doubt there's the odd genuine one but overall the similarity between comments smacks of fakery and use of AI to generate supportive nonsense.

Could they really be that far up their own holes?

I know two gay guys over in Cambridge who just had a baby via a surrogate. Their friend actually offered to be the surrogate in this case. I've no doubt they'll be excellent parents, two really good guys. I don't get the big deal, you should see the state of some of the so called parents around where I live, strung out on heroin and screaming in their toddler's faces. Give me two stand up gay guys over lousy hetero parents any day.

But yes I don't know why I have to keep seeing these two gobsh*tes and their babies in the news, no one cares.

Brian is a Co host on one of Virgin Media's morning shows and Arthur is a judge on RTE's Dancing with the Stars. I wouldn't expect them to be rolling in cash but I'd say they make decent money.

Arthur is bizarrely an ambassador for Gaa Cul Camps despite having no connection to the GAA.

I 100% would do the same if I had any, far too many weirdos out there. But the issue I am taking is your call for a law to stop them. It's very possible they ARE idiots as you say, I don't live in Ireland at the moment so literally only know the lad from Big Brother, but laws affect us all. So if you take something from them, you are taking it from me, you and everyone else here.

These 2 prize turnips are with Noel Kelly PR I think?

Surrogacy is basically rich people buying babies off poorer people. Wasn't ok when the church did it though.