Wednesday, August 01, 2012

UK excises the six-letter f-word

An American Conservative article about the decline of the UK writes:
As part of the drive towards institutionalizing same-sex marriage — which is being spearheaded not by radical gays but by our posh, foppish Conservative prime minister, David Cameron—words such as “husband” and “wife” and “father” and “mother” are being airbrushed from much official government documentation. So welfare and immigration forms will shortly be scrubbed clean of any mention of the w-word or the h-word, in favor of more “neutral” terms such as “spouse” or “partner” because, as the Daily Telegraph reports, the government believes that once same-sex marriage is legalized “it would be confusing to refer to husbands and wives.”

Fathers are already disappearing. At the end of May, the National Health Service, the largest employer in Britain — and the fifth largest in the world — took the decision to excise the six-letter f-word from a pamphlet on rearing children that it has been giving to mothers- and fathers-to-be for the past 14 years. The pamphlet will no longer refer to fathers following a complaint from one person — yes, that is all it takes to airbrush people from history in modern Britain — who was concerned that such terminology is “not inclusive of people in same-sex relationships.” From now on the pamphlet will refer to mothers and “partners.” Dads are so 20th century.
I hate to write about LGBT issues again, because I don't care what they do. Except that they are always trying erase the meanings of mothers and fathers.

I got this from the Spearhead blog, which also has an essay arguing that same-sex marriage could have some advantages, as well as the obvious disadvantages:
I have a son in Ontario whose friend was denied access to his children, so he went back to court. The judge issued an order stating that in any month that access was denied, the following month’s support payment would be reduced by a hefty percentage. Correlation is not causation, but this was unheard of prior to gay marriage. I’ve also heard that family courts sometime find that women are perpetrators of emotional cruelty.
Now there is some wishful thinking. If I thought that same-sex marriage would somehow cause the family courts to suddenly have some common sense, then I would be all in favor of it. But I don't see the connection.

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