This news article on a recent parenting case is alright in itself, but falls apart in two respects.

The only weblinks it provides in the related links section are to “father’s rights” organisations, one of which is the infamously horrible Fathers 4 Justice, a bunch of people whose favoured tactics for gaining support were dressing up as superheroes and scaling public buildings, performing occasional security breach stunts and committing serious vandalism on family court offices. (As an aside, I don’t link to their Wikipedia article here as I usually would do because it’s very very poor. Even for Wikipedia. You have been warned.) This should at least be balanced by a link to someone who’ll actually tell the truth rather than just ill-informedly rant. They’re also given far too much time in the article itself.

Worse, the “Have Your Say” boxout, giving a sample of the latest drivel from the BBC’s should-have-been-shut-down-years-ago comments section, currently has a quote from a “Jon” interspersed with the actual article:

So I presume the mother will expect the state to be paying for the childs upkeep, instead of the father!

The article itself, however, points out that

[The woman] said she wanted the baby girl, who is now 19 weeks old, adopted at birth without the knowledge of either them or her father.

So no, Jon, she bloody well doesn’t, you presume wrong, you’re a woman-hating berk who believes all that Fathers 4 Illiteracy tell you about the family courts system and whoever picked that entirely wrong quote out from the Have Your Say Fascist Wannabe Comments Pile should really think about what bias actually means the next time they do such a thing; the place where the comment quote is positioned makes it look a lot like an actual quote from the story, which is way wrong.

Besides, it’s worth pointing out the context of the story: the woman is an adult. She lives on her own. Why should a court anywhere in Britain even consider forcing her to tell her parents (which is how it got to the Appeal Court for this ruling), which we can assume from the context to be something that would cause a massive amount of embarrassment or possibly serious repercussions? That they would decide to do so is in itself worrying; this appeals decision, on the other hand, is probably the right one for everyone involved, hence why the F4J crowd think it’s wrong. Still, can’t win ’em all.

Edit 26/11/2007: Also note this much better Guardian article, with the detail that the idiot local authority actually wrote to the woman’s parents by mistake and without half the article taken up by comments from pressure groups.