The U.S. State Department has changed some fundamental terminology on passport applications, reflecting the increasing numbers of same-sex partners who have become parents. Following heavy lobbying on the part of homosexual activist groups, the words “mother” and “father” are being removed from U.S. passport applications and replaced with the terms “parent one” and “parent two.”
On its website the State Department explained that the “improvements” were being implemented “to provide a gender neutral description of a child’s parents and in recognition of different types of families.”
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In an effort to deflect charges that the changes are being made to placate homosexual partners who were having difficulty determining who should claim the customary parenting labels indicated on passport applications, Brenda Sprague, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services, offered the following confusing explanation for the change: “We find that with changes in medical science and reproductive technology that we are confronting situations now that we would not have anticipated 10 or 15 years ago.”
Nonetheless, homosexual activists have given the move a solid thumbs-up. Fred Sainz, vice president of the Human Rights Campaign, told the Washington Post that the move is “a positive step forward for all American families,” adding, “It was time that the federal government acknowledged the reality that hundreds of thousands of kids in this country are being raised by same-sex parents.”
Jennifer Chrisler, whose group, the Family Equality Council, had been pushing for the change for several years, said that changing the terms “mother” and “father” to the generic “parent” allows “many different types of families to be able to go and apply for a passport for their child without feeling like the government doesn’t recognize their family.”
Chrisler recalled to Fox News that when she and her homosexual partner attempted to get passports for the twin sons she gave birth to, “my partner … had to put her name in the father field, and that is both discriminatory and makes us feel like second-class citizens.” She said that “the government needs to recognize that the family structure is changing. The best thing that we can do is support people who are raising kids in loving, stable families.”
But Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council argued that the change is part of a strategy to “advance the causes of same-sex ‘marriage’ and homosexual parenting,” maintaining that the move “violates the spirit if not the letter of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)…. The State Department’s abolition of motherhood and fatherhood would be almost comical, if it did not fly in the face of the mounting social science evidence that children are most likely to thrive when born into a family led by their own married biological mother and father.”
He contended that “only in the topsy-turvy world of left-wing political correctness could it be considered an ‘improvement’ for a birth-related document to provide less information about the circumstances of that birth.”
Perkins added that since President Obama’s Justice Department “is purposefully failing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in the courts … it is little surprise that his State Department would show the same disrespect for U.S. law. The House of Representatives should take their oversight rule very seriously and intervene in both these circumstances.”
