One of the characteristics in many dystopian novels, such as "The Giver," is the way families are portrayed as something less than warm. They're more contractual and detached. They're roommates that happen to share similar DNA to one another. Movies like "Equilibrium" portray this well, showing a family so emotionally detached from one another that they monitor and instruct one another if mistakes are made.
That's the feeling I got when I saw this recent article from my colleague Bob Hoge, who wrote of a new bill being passed that replaced the word "Mother" with "gestating parent."
As he lays out plainly, it's a ridiculous move:
This assault on basic logic and common sense is now headed to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk, and knowing her, she’ll probably sign it.
Sexual reproduction between a male and female comprises the dominant mode across all known Earth species, and only a tiny few can procreate without two things recognized throughout recorded history: a mother and a father. Humans are not among that minuscule group that can do without. In their obsessive quest for “woke,” however, leftists have long ago abandoned any measure of logic or reliance on science.
The thing is, we can't say this isn't based in science as we do with transgenderism, which this bill is clearly meant to make feel "inclusive" in our society. Women do, indeed, do all the gestating, while it's men who contribute the gametes. One gestates, the other does not.
But there's a point where scientific descriptions go from helping us shape and understand our reality to effectively stripping it of its meaning. At that point, science stops being a method by which we understand the universe we live in and starts being a tool by which we start stripping humanity from ourselves, and sterilizing this thing we call life.
And that's what's raising the alarms for me.
Yes, it's annoying and outrageous that transgenderism is still so prevalent in radical leftist circles that they're trying to define mother and father legally. Still, I feel the more sinister aspect of this is that they're effectively trying to remove relational ownership that comes with being a family and replacing it with a cold, detached sort of description that puts up emotionless dividers between family members.
No longer is it mommy and daddy; it's parental unit one and two. It's not the warmth of love and care between family members; it's now a contractual relationship that can be dictated at the state level. Blood and birth mean nothing.
Moreover, from a Christian perspective, it feels like the state is replacing God as the most important member of the family. Whereas He formed the foundation of the familial bond by making the mother and father responsible for the body and spiritual upbringing of the child, the state is stepping in and removing the titles that give the parents that weight. They're replacing them with cold descriptors that describe an action (or in the father's case, an inaction), not a function.
Ultimately, this feels like the state trying to redefine the family dynamic in order to insert itself into it. This may sound like hyperbole, but I think we have too much history behind us to know that if there's one thing authoritarians love, it's having total control, and you can't have total control if the backbone of society, the familial unit, is more loyal to each other than to the state.
Transgenderism is definitely a threat.
This is worse.
Protecting our children doesn't just mean keeping them away from the creeps wearing women's clothes and clown makeup. That's the obvious foe.
The other foe is the authoritarians in expensive suits and fake smiles who constantly pretend they're doing this and that for the "greater good," which always includes attempting to pull children into the "warm collectivism" of cold bureaucracy. The state would love to eliminate your authority over your child. That's been the same tale since time immemorial.
They just call it "democracy" now.
