A beautiful photo of two fathers tearfully embracing their newborn son has been stolen by anti-gay-parent groups.
In 2014, when Frankie Nelson and B.J. Barone met their son Milo for the first time, like all new parents, they were overwhelmed with emotion.
The moment was captured by photographer Lindsay Forster and quickly went viral, making headlines and eliciting messages of love and support across the world.
Milo was born via surrogate and the image was hailed as an intimate celebration of diversity – not all families have a mum and dad, after all.
The picture is doing the rounds again this week, but sadly for a different reason, disgustingly co-opted for homophobic propaganda.
Independent Irish politician Mary E. Fitzgibbon shared it on her now-private Twitter account, alongside a too-perfect-to-be-real photo of a heterosexual couple and their infant son.
She captioned it: “We must reaffirm the right of a child to grow up and be loved where possible by their own mother and father.”
If that weren’t more than enough bigoted dross for a happy family to endure of a weekend, the picture was then appropriated by Italian far right group Fratelli d’Italia and turned, uncredited, into a poster.
“He will never be able to say ‘mum’,” it read in Italian.
“We should be defending the rights of the children.”
Top Comments
This is so ridiculous. I can't believe people like this are actually still in the world. Get over it, and let other people be happy.
When will people realise the lack of mum/dad argument simply doesn't work in the modern world?! There are too many exceptions: single parent families (whether through divorce/death/adoption/IVF on their own), children raised by single aunts/uncles/grandparents, children raised in foster homes (no consistent parent figures), children raised in orphanages...these kids might not know a "mum" or "dad" permanently or ever, yet we accept these types of households for them. This argument does not work.
I find the hypocrisy galling, especially in Ireland, that those calling for a child to have a mother and father are Catholic zealots who support a church that deprived kids of their mother by selling them off to US families and kept their mothers locked up in the Magdalene Laundries.
You are talking about something that happened more than 100 years ago!!!!!By those standards, you can condemn just about anyone and anything! Live in the present!
"more than 100 years ago"
No, it carried on until much more recently than that.
Cite please!