You may have read yesterday’s story about a guidebook by the British Association of Adoption and Fostering, which referred to opponents of same-sex adoption as “retarded homophobes”. Today’s Daily Telegraph features a scathing response-from a homosexual columnist.

Andrew Pierce, writing in the Notebook section of the paper, says that he himself actually supports same-sex adoption. But he says that he has friends, who themselves are a same-sex couple, who take the view “which most reasonable folk would call traditional, or even old-fashioned, that children should be brought up by a man and a woman”.

But, he writes “BAAF does not think that my friends are traditional or old-fashioned. Retarded, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means ‘backward in mental or physical development’”.

Pierce himself, he writes, was adopted. He concludes: “Do you know, considering this latest PC tirade from BAAF, I’m relieved that it was a Catholic children’s society – also condemned by the association, for being unwilling to deal with gay couples – that handled my adoption when I was a two-year-old. God only knows what would have become of me had I been left in the hands of this bigoted, bullying bureaucracy with its dogmatic agenda.”