Attacking the Family: Making the Terms “Father” and “Mother” Passé

by: selwyn duke | published: 01 11, 2011

It seems that our neutered, post-Christian culture just can’t do enough to vindicate Muslims’ accusation of Western decadence. And the latest affront to common sense and Truth is an attack upon the family: The State Department will remove the terms “father” and “mother” from passport applications and replace them with “gender neutral terminology.” Reporting on the story, Fox News writes:

“The words in the old form were ‘mother’ and ‘father,’” said Brenda Sprague, deputy assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services. "They are now ‘parent one’ and ‘parent two.’"

A statement on the State Department website noted: “These improvements are being made to provide a gender neutral description of a child’s parents and in recognition of different types of families [emphasis added].”

Improvements? A real improvement would be eliminating the Brenda Spragues from government.

Yet Sprague insists that political correctness had nothing to do with the decision, explaining, writes Fox, “We find that with changes in medical science and reproductive technology that we are confronting situations now that we would not have anticipated 10 or 15 years ago.” Ah, what an intellectual girl. 

Yes, this is all the result of a deeply cerebral process that draws upon the most serious scholarship. I’m sure the fact that the homosexual group the Family Equality Council (FEC) had been lobbying for years to get the passport applications altered had nothing to do with this decision whatsoever.

In justifying the change, executive director of the FEC Jennifer Chrisler said that the “government needs to recognize that the family structure is changing.” This is nonsense. It’s much like addressing our growing obesity problem, saying that the “government needs to recognize that physiques are changing” and then casting corpulence as normal. (With this analogy, I’m not implying that Michelle Obamaesque nanny-state intrusion is justified, only that government should not be actively undermining people’s sense of what is normal and healthy.) Government has no business encouraging bad health.

Likewise, insofar as government is going to be involved in influencing the family, it has a duty to not undermine familial health. The family is the central building block of civilization, and nations rise and fall with its fortunes.  And as with obesity and other physical problems, familial anomalies will inevitably exist (e.g., single-parent households). But this doesn’t mean they should be normalized.

So this is where we stand as a society in 2011, Reader One, Reader Two, etc. We’re so darn inclusive, we’re including the poison pill in the software of civilization. This is Writer One, signing off.      

add a comment