The Patriot Post® · New York's Parental Newspeak

To start us off, here’s a joke:

The gestating parent and non-gestating parent are great at compromise: the non-gestating parent admits they are wrong, and the gestating parent agrees with them.

Does using gender-neutral terms enhance this old joke, or does it make it more cumbersome and unfunny? Hopefully, the answer is obvious.

“Gestating” and “non-gestating” parents are cumbersome and demeaning ways to reference very important people: moms and dads. But in Albany, New York, the woke Democrat politicians in the state legislature just sent to Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk a bill that would change some legal language for family court and domestic and educational law. Instead of referring to a mom as “mother,” she is now a “gestating parent.” Conversely, a father is referred to as a “non-gestating parent” or just “parent.”

The stated reason for the change is that an increasing number of same-sex couples are involved in family cases (adoption, surrogacy, family court, etc.). However, same-sex marriages don’t change the fact that both mothers are gestating individuals or that both dads are non-gestating individuals.

The new legal language isn’t clarifying, but rather makes everything more obscure, as the more commonsense politicos in New York are pointing out.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman had this to say regarding the unnecessary and frivolous legislation: “Democrats led by Kathy Hochul have continued their declaration of war on New York families by canceling the loving terms of Mom and Dad and replacing them with ‘gestating and non-gestating parent’. The insanity ends when I’m Governor.”

State Conservative Party Chairman Gerard Kassar told reporters, “It’s an example of how out of tune the New York legislature is. It’s an unnecessary and wasteful use of time. Imagine people who are considering moving to New York seeing this and saying, ‘Do I need this silliness?’”

When Hochul was asked about the legislation — which she either has to sign or veto — she claimed that she couldn’t speak on it because she wasn’t “familiar with what was introduced.”

As the New York Post pointed out, Hochul is the first governor of the Empire State to be a mother, though it’s unsurprising that she dodged the question. Hochul, despite her pride in being a mom, will likely bend the knee to whatever her party demands of her — and in anti-family New York, “mother” and “father” are not in vogue.

As The Washington Stand’s Joshua Arnold astutely observes, New York’s deviation from “mother” and “father” is a sign of just how far society has strayed from biblical theology. Furthermore, FRC’s Center for Biblical Worldview Director Dr. David Closson told The Stand:

It’s sad, but I’m not surprised by this.

Years ago, during the debates on same-sex marriage … we were assured that redefining marriage would have no effect on our understanding of motherhood or fatherhood or parenthood. But … once marriage is no longer fundamentally connected to the union of a man and a woman, and then, once surrogacy enters the picture, separating biological children from their parents, well, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain why the law should privilege terms like father and mother.

This is not appearing out of nowhere. If a child can have two fathers or two mothers, a surrogate mother, an egg donor, a gestational carrier, well, our legal system eventually is going to have to develop new categories and new terminology to sort out some of those relationships. And ‘gestating parent,’ as silly as it sounds — that’s the kind of language that emerges when parenthood is detached from biological reality.

We as a nation have strayed from heterosexual marriage, we have strayed from the belief that a nuclear family is the safest and best structure for children, and we have strayed from the immutable fact that body and soul are inseparable. You cannot be born in the “wrong body” and have a different gendered soul.

Using so-called gender-neutral legal language isn’t inclusive; it’s demeaning and dehumanizing. Hopefully, the residents of New York will stand against this legislation and make their opinions known.