An inevitable result of the supposedly harmless innovation of homosexual “marriage”

When a supporter of homosexual “marriage” smugly says to you, “How does it hurt me, how does it hurt you, how does it hurt society, if two men or two women are allowed to marry each other and express their love for each other?”, one answer you can give him is this: “It will result in the official elimination of the concepts of mother and father. Does that bother you? Or are you fine with that?” If your interlocutor is brought up short by your answer, he will have to admit that homosexual marriage is not just about benignly including same-sex couples in the institution of marriage, but about effecting an extremely radical transformation of human society. And if he’s not brought up short, then he is exposed as someone who supports that extremely radical transformation.

Fox News reports today:

‘Mother,’ ‘Father’ Changing to ‘Parent One,’ ‘Parent Two’ on Passport Applications

The words “mother” and “father” will be removed from U.S. passport applications and replaced with gender neutral terminology, the State Department says.

“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.” The statement didn’t note if it was for child applications only.

The State Department said the new passport applications, not yet available to the public, will be available online soon.

Sprague said the decision to remove the traditional parenting names was not an act of political correctness.

“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,” she said.

Gay rights groups are applauding the decision.

“Changing the term mother and father to the more global term of parent allows many different types of families to be able to go and apply for a passport for their child without feeling like the government doesn’t recognize their family,” said Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of Family Equality Council.

Her organization lobbied the government for several years to remove the words from passport applications.

“Our government needs to recognize that the family structure is changing,” Chrisler said. “The best thing that we can do is support people who are raising kids in loving, stable families.”

But some conservative Christians are outraged over the decision.

“Only in the topsy-turvy world of left-wing political correctness could it be considered an ‘improvement’ for a birth-related document to provide less information about the circumstances of that birth,” Family Research Council president Tony Perkins wrote in a statement to Fox News Radio. “This is clearly designed to advance the causes of same-sex ‘marriage’ and homosexual parenting without statutory authority, and violates the spirit if not the letter of the Defense of Marriage Act.”

Robert Jeffress, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, agreed. “It’s part of an overall attempt at political correctness to diminish the distinction between men and women and to somehow suggest you don’t need both a father and a mother to raise a child successfully,” said Jeffress. “(This decision) was made to make homosexual couples feel more comfortable in rearing children.”

Chrisler recounted the day she and her female partner tried to get her twin sons passports.

“Even though my partner was their legal mother, had adopted them after I gave birth to them, she still had to put her name in the father field, and that is both discriminatory and makes us feel like second-class citizens,” she said.

Sprague said she would not use the word discriminatory to describe the old passport form.

“I would prefer to use the word imprecise,” she said. “It just didn’t capture the reality of their situation. Clearly, we want to be sensitive to the feelings of other people, but we are also very conscious of our need to introduce the greatest degree of precision to the process.”

Perkins, meanwhile, accused the State Department of disrespecting the law and called on Congress to “take their oversight rule very seriously and intervene in both these circumstances.”

The new gender-neutral passport application will be rolled out in February.

[end of article]

Of course this change is driven not just by homosexual marriage, but by homosexual adoption as well. Once homosexual couples are allowed to adopt, as they increasingly are in this country and elsewhere, you instantly have “alternative” families to which the terms “mother” and “father” do not apply. Therefore, in order to include homosexual couples equally in the parental relationship and not exclude them or treat them as “second-class parents,” the terms “mother” and “father” must be replaced by sex-neutral terms.

If you want to stop the elimination of the words mother and father, there is only one way to do it: homosexual adoption, homosexual civil partnership, and homosexual marriage must be eliminated. There ain’t no neutral ground.

- end of initial entry -

Ed L. writes:

“It will result in the official elimination of the concepts of mother and father. Does that bother you? Or are you fine with that?”

Another answer to the question, “What harm does homosexual marriage cause?,” is that the insistence on formal equality creates an interaction effect. Heterosexual marriage will be affected if the bridal dress shop or catering boutique down the street finds itself slapped with a discrimination lawsuit for not serving the gay market.

Leonard K. writes:

There is much more on this than just the U.S. passport application. Just Google for “ban father and mother words” (without quotes). As with other perversions, Europe seems more “advanced” than America …

Chris B. writes:

Who among the two mothers of Jennifer Chrisler’s family teaches their son how to fly fish? Build a camp fire on a stormy night? Target practice? shoot hoops? Play touch football? Who among that sorry pair has the energy to rough house for thirty minutes with their eight year old boy? And how is the poor kid to explain to his friends when they visit (if they are ever invited to visit) what it’s like to have two mothers? Which one of this pair will aid the boy in identifying with the heroes of Valley Forge, Gettysburg, Okinawa, or pass him insights on the genius, hard work and courage it takes to became a Vincent Van Gough, Isaac Newton, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, or Albert Einstein? Finally, will they be capable of coaching him on how to respond to the snide jokes certain to make the neighborhood rounds? This is the stuff that makes my skin crawl—in the same fashion Norman Bates made my skin crawl when I first saw Psycho. Chrisler and whoever she is living with, as well as their tax funded enablers, are today’s Norma and Norman Bates, and should be institutionalized for the rest of their lives.

LA writes:

I continue to be discouraged by conservatives’ mental laziness and inability to grasp this issue properly. Consider the response of Tony Perkins (that’s Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, not Tony Perkins of Psycho) to the word change:

“Only in the topsy-turvy world of left-wing political correctness could it be considered an ‘improvement’ for a birth-related document to provide less information about the circumstances of that birth.”

When he calls it the “topsy turvy world of political correctness,” he is saying that the word change is ridiculous and irrational. But it’s not ridiculous or irrational. It’s entirely rational. Once you have same-sex couples as parents, the word-pair “mother and father” does not include those parents, and therefore different words, sex-neutral words, are needed to include them. The elimination of the words mother and father is not some silly, unnecessary indulgence, but a logically inevitable result of same-sex parenthood.

Will the day ever come when conservatives stop automatically using the mindless, dismissive term “political correctness” to refer to leftist phenomena which are in fact deeply coherent and deadly serious?

LA continues:

And the answer to my question is, sadly, No, not so long as Americans continue in their British-based dislike of analyzing political phenomena in terms of first principles and as outgrowths of first principles. Americans, like the British, consider it bad taste, a form of incivility, to reason rigorously and logically. As a result, American conservatives are unable to identify the nature of the leftist dynamic that is steadily destroying our society, or to propose a counter-principle to it. All they can do, in the face of each new leftist victory, is to mutter, “political correctness, political correctness, political correctness…”

The amazing fact is that “political correctness” is, and has been for a long time, conservatives’ principal term for describing leftist phenomena, yet this term lacks any substantive or conceptual content. It conveys zero information about the leftist phenomena to which it refers. Conservatives thus find themselves in the midst of one of the greatest social revolutions in history, the Revolution of Non-Discrimination, and they are unable to understand it, because they’ve made no effort to understand it, because they complacently think that their pat but empty phrase “political correctness” is a sufficient description of it.

Leonard K. writes:

We shoud ban the words “he” and “she”. They are offensive to hermaphrodites.

Let’s call everyone “it”!

Ted G. writes:

This truly shocking. Truly Orwellian.

Parent 1, Parent 2.

But I am most shocked by what I know will be the reaction of the mass of fools around us.

Roland D. writes:

You wrote: “Of course this change is driven not just by homosexual marriage, but by homosexual adoption as well.”

It’s also driven by unmarried homosexual couples using in-vitro fertilization and/or surrogate motherhood to create new children in nontraditional ways.

January 8

James N. writes:

I think you are taking an important step in leading the discussion (of all the things we discuss) toward the underlying principle which moves the left. Most of their “big issues” are really the same issue, and the choice of sex instead of race or economic status as the edge of the wedge has been, in retrospect, brilliant.

Everybody knows, somehow, that your economic condition has something to do with your behavior. Everybody knows (or at least behaves as if) staying away from large concentrations of blacks is a good idea for you and your children.

But to have sex with whomever you want, whenever you want, however you want, according only to your passions? Yes, homosexuals are exhibit “A,” but this behavior is by no means unpopular among the much larger fraction of the population that is not homosexual.

So having homosexuals “come out” and declare their invented selves (an invention which is not without considerable effort, in my opinion) is a beacon to all the normals, signifying that they too can invent themselves, or re-invent themselves, according to whatever it is they wish to do or to possess.

And even beyond the sex—defining who and what you are, all on your own (imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do; nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too)—man, that is Original Sin with a capital “O” and a capital “S.” Owing nothing to anyone—no such thing as duty, no such thing as valor, no such thing as courage (except the courage to come out), no love, no beauty except that which excites our passions of the day, no truth (“what IS truth”—how wonderful that the writer of the gospel preserved THAT quote).

An entirely self-defined and self-referential identity. That’s the project underway since 1789. The long discussion on nominalism at VFR in 2003 touched on this issue, in that, if actual things are only real to the extent that we name them something, and if naming them is a free choice, then we are no longer prisoners of reality. But homosexualism takes Grand Nominalism and reduces it to self-naming.

And, of course, it just so happens that atomized individuals unconnected to family, place, faith, or nation and under the sway of their sexual, gustatory, or acquisitive passions are easily ruled by those who preach the gospel of self-definition.

Funny about that.

Ken Hechtman writes:

Only two spaces for parents’ names? The polyfamilies aren’t going to like this at all!

LA replies:

You can be their spokesperson.

Ken Hechtman replies (Jan.8):

I don’t suppose I’d say anything breath-takingly original, certainly nothing that hasn’t already been said by the spokesmen for same-sex parents.

Maybe something like: “The purpose of these fields on government forms is to collect information about people’s actual living arrangements. Lecturing the public about the ideal living arrangement is somebody else’s job and it’s done with different tools at a different place and time.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 07, 2011 06:17 PM | Send