“We could teach those Zimbabweans a thing or two about lesbian parenting.”

A lesbian couple in Bulawayo, the second largest city in Zimbabwe, have announced they’re expecting a child conceived via artificial insemination. Zimbabwe, as you probably know, is not a particularly gay-friendly country; two years ago, their government passed legislation making it illegal for gay couples to hold hands or even hug. President Robert Mugabe, who chooses to believe that homosexuality doesn’t exist in the animal kingdom, has gone on record as saying that gays are “worse than dogs or pigs.” (Clearly he has never met my parents’ dog, who couldn’t be more bisexual if he were a character in Velvet Goldmine.)

Given Zimbabwe’s charming national history of institutionalized homophobia, this article condemning the happy couple shouldn’t come as any surprise, but I still found myself taken aback by the harsh language used by journalist Sithabisiwe Mathema, who refers to the pregnancy as an “uncanny and bizarre incident” perpetrated by the “seemingly conscienceless” lesbian couple, who traveled to South Africa for the procedure.

Mathema describes artificial insemination as a process “commonly used for animal breeding purposes,” neglecting to point out that it’s widely used by heterosexual humans as well, and strangely posits that it “stands to be seen” how a lesbian couple will be able to raise a child, nonsensically adding that, “like other children the baby will have to call one of them father and the other mother.”

As for the lengthy and completely bizarre comments offered by Aaron Ndlovu, who lives in the same flat as the expectant couple and apparently considers himself some kind of scientist (the kind who is completely fucking stupid), I’ll let you to discover those gems on your own and leave you with the words of Melissa Jacobs, the woman whose pregnancy inspired all this vitriol: “We are so enthralled about the birth of our son. We feel so proud even though people look at us disdainfully — they do not understand that even though we are ‘faggots’ as they call us, we also want to fulfill dreams of also raising a family to carry on our name.”

Congratulations to Melissa and her partner.