The Patriot Post® · Biden's New 'Don't Say Dad' Rule

If Joe Biden wants to be reelected, he sure has a funny way of showing it.

A new rule proposed by his Department of Health and Human Services wants to quietly erase the idea of the American family by banning essential biologically descriptive terms such as “mother,” “father,” and “paternity” from the Office of Child Support Services and replace them with more “gender-neutral” words like “parentage.” The OCSS also suggests getting rid of sex-specific pronouns such as “his” and “her” and replacing them with the grammatically nonsensical “their.”

As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd writes, “OCSS recognizes that current law requires ‘the establishment of paternity and requiring genetic testing in contested paternity cases’ but claims that’s no excuse to limit the definition of parent to a child’s biological mother and father.”

Good grief. The new mumbo-jumbo is hidden within this 10-page pile of bureaucratese. At this point, the proposed rule is just that — proposed — so the American people still have until November 27 to weigh in with their thoughts on the pending change. Perhaps it’d be a good time to give Team Biden’s OCSS an earful.

You can do so right here.

To call the proposed policy “Orwellian” isn’t a stretch. Certain words have certain meanings. The notion of “misgendering,” by which a person refuses to play along with the gender-identity charade by referring to a man by using female pronouns, is ridiculous on its face.

But it’s more than ridiculous. It’s Marxist. And it’s destructive. Recall that the self-described Marxists of Black Lives Matter surreptitiously scrubbed certain language from their website diminishing the importance of the traditional Western nuclear family. But those grifters only did so because word of their radicalism got out, and it began to hurt their fundraising capabilities. As the New York Post reported at the time, “The group, whose co-founder Patrisse Cullors has described herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza as ‘trained Marxists,’ removed a page titled ‘What We Believe’ that included its public policy positions as well as describing itself as part of the ‘global Black family.’”

What were BLM’s Marxists trying to do? It’s simple, according to the language they shoved down the memory hole: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable,” the website formerly read.

Our Mark Alexander recently addressed the so-called civil rights issue that’s inherent in the battle to promote this larger pathology: “I realize school administrators nationwide are constrained by an errant 2020 Supreme Court decision classifying deviant sexual pathology as a ‘protected civil right,’ on par with race and ethnicity. That court decision set into motion a litany of contortionist efforts by government bureaucracies (including schools) and private sector business to ‘accommodate’ this gender diktat.”

As for the OPCC, some Republican lawmakers have had enough of the Left’s gender games — at least enough to fire off a sternly worded memo. Senators Marco Rubio, James Lankford, Kevin Cramer, Mike Braun, Ted Cruz, and Cindy Hyde-Smith “penned a letter in October condemning the Biden administration for trying to force its ‘don’t say dad’ agenda on American taxpayers.”

The letter begins: “On September 26, 2023, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a proposed rule that would eliminate words like ‘father, 'mother,’ and ‘paternity’ from federal child-support regulations and instead replace them with gender-neutral alternatives. Your administration’s ‘Don’t Say Dad’ agenda is not only confusing; it does nothing to help single parents who are struggling to provide for their children. We urge you to rescind the proposed rule, acknowledge the essential role that mothers and fathers play in families, and focus your efforts on more important matters.”

Indeed, there are far more important matters confronting us than whether someone feels “excluded” by age-old words such as “mother,” “father,” and “paternity.”