Wednesday, January 12, 2011

State Department joins war on marriage

The U. S. State Department has now officially joined the War on Marriage:

Goodbye, Mom and Dad. Hello, Parent One and Parent Two.

The State Department has decided to make U.S. passport application forms "gender neutral" by removing references to mother and father, officials said, in favor of language that describes one's parentage somewhat less tenderly.

The change is “in recognition of different types of families,” according to a statement issued just before Christmas that drew widespread attention Friday after a Fox News report.
Every time you see an organization doing something like this they try to take cover under the language of necessity, when in fact it is simply another instance of a government entity taking a politically activist stand on a controversial social issue.

Was there really some problem the State Department is trying to solve here? Was it causing an administrative problem for somebody? Of course not. It's just another way of throwing a bone to gay rights groups who have political power far out of proportion to their actual numbers.

What other government procedures are we going to change in order to kowtow to gay rights groups? Will passport application forms still ask the gender of the person applying? Or are we going to take full account of gay rights ideology and instead start asking applicants where they fall on the gender spectrum between male and female?

Now that could create some interesting administrative headaches.

HT: Gene Veith

2 comments:

KyCobb said...

Martin,

Its not the job of the federal government to discriminate against people just because they don't conform to your religious beliefs. Get over it.

Art said...

Let's see if I've got this straight (no pun intended):

The old passport forms asked for "Father’s Name - First & Middle Last" and "Mother’s Name - First & Middle Last (Maiden)". And it tells applicants:

"WARNING: False statements made knowingly and willfully in passport applications, including affidavits or other documents submitted to support this application, are punishable by fine and/or imprisonment under the provisions of 18 USC 1001, 18 USC 1542, and/or 18 USC 1621."

The State Department realizes that asking explicitly for the names of father and mother inadvertently places children of non-traditional households in some hypothetical* legal jeopardy, if they wish or must, for whatever reason, wish to travel to, say, Canada. So they do the right thing and change the form to eliminate this needless hurdle.

And this is supposed to be a battle in the "war on marriage"???

Yeah, that's some more of that good ol' critical thinking that conservative Christians are so good at.

(*Well, Martin wishes it were more than hypothetical. If he cannot have the sorts of laws they have in Kenya, he can hope for some other way to imprison homosexuals for no good reason.)