Author, columnist, speaker

When Ideology Trumps Reality

By Robert Knight

 Just in time for the upcoming Father’s Day and the traditional month of weddings, the New York state legislature passed a law getting rid of the terms “father” and “mother” in family court proceedings.

Instead, dad will be “non-gestational parent,” and mom will be “gestational parent.”

How heart-warming is that?” Can’t you just see the new, improved Hallmark cards?

It’s quite a step down for Dad, who gets defined only by a negative.

Unfortunately, this proposed law is not a Babylon Bee satire. It’s the work of an increasingly certifiable Democratic Party that is taking a sledgehammer to what remains of our moral foundations.

In the state Senate, which passed the bill on June 2, all Democrats except three voted for the lunacy. Two opted out, and Rep. James Skoufis of the Hudson Valley was the lone Democrat voting no. Bully for him, although I can’t imagine what “presents” the LGBTQ tolerance police will leave on his doorstep, on his voicemail and at his office.

In the state Assembly, the measure passed 91 to 46, with 86 Democrats and five Republicans voting yes. Nine Democrats voted no, and nine were absent. Of the 46 Republicans, 37 voted no, while five voted yes, with four absent.

That makes nine Republicans who refused to stand up for sanity.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has been coy, refusing to say whether she’ll sign it or veto it. It might depend on how much she cares whether she and her state become even more of a punchline than they are.

Right now, the spotlight is on Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee, Graham Platner, best known for his Nazi tattoo, sexting, roughness with women, and his communist ideology. Remember when Maine was famous for lobster, pine trees, lakes, and teeth-rattling nor’easters?

And then there’s Texas, where Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico has referred to women as “neighbors with a uterus.” For people at war with biology, the Democrats sure seem obsessed with bodily-function-based identities.

Meanwhile, the New York state Republican leadership, fearful of anything that might annoy LGBTQ activists, went into a familiar crouch over the “gestational” bill.

In a Fox News interview, New York Minority Leader Edward Ra seemed only to complain that it didn’t involve money.

“We don’t think it does anything to make New York more affordable on a permanent basis, and that’s what New Yorkers are talking about, that’s what they care about,” he said. “They want to know what we’re doing to make their lives more affordable.”

Well, undermining mom-and-dad married families makes everything more expensive. For example, trillions of tax dollars have been spent on welfare and crime since 1960s, when the Democrats’ Great Society began paying women to have babies out of wedlock.

Along the same lines as Mr. Ra, New York Conservative Party Chairman Gerard Kassar criticized the measure as “an unnecessary and wasteful use of time.""

Providing some moral gravity, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, let the Dems have it in a social media post reported in The Washington Times: “In Kathy Hochul’s New York, ’mom’ is now defined as ’gestating parent,’” Mr. Blakeman wrote. “Not when I’m Governor! I’ll stand up for moms and dads against this insanity.”

Speaking of dads, they have gotten lousy press in recent years. A front-page Washington Post article on June 7 was headlined: “No letup in pace of domestic killings: Three fathers slay families in a week.”

Wow. Better keep clear of Dad.

The Post article features studies showing an alarming increase in “family and intimate-partner killings.” As usual, the article doesn’t distinguish between married and unmarried killers and victims. But, according to the FBI, “unmarried/cohabiting/dating partners” are responsible for about 55 percent of intimate partner homicides, while spouses account for only 45 percent, even though of the nation’s 80 million U.S. households, 58 million are married-couple households.

It’s hard to find crime report figures that distinguish between married and cohabiting perps and victims. The government stopped highlighting that parameter, just as it stopped making it easy to find data on LGBTQ intimate partner violence.

I have a theory. Sheer numbers make the case that women and also men in a married household are far less likely to be perps or victims of violence. This goes against woke ideology, which says marriage is either regressive, unimportant, or infinitely open to redefinition.

In his book “What Really Matters,” Focus on the Family Vice President Tim Goeglein makes the case that marriage is indispensable to societal well-being and provides evidence that co-habitation is socially corrosive. Instead of providing a “starter” version of marriage, living together before taking vows correlates with a significantly higher rate of divorce.

“Couples who wait to live together until they are married (or at the very least engaged) are likely to have a higher respect for the institution of marriage and have some form of religious faith providing moral boundaries,” he writes.

Mr. Goeglein quotes the late James Q. Wilson, who wrote: “Marriage was once a sacrament. Then it became a contract, and now it is an arrangement.”

So, “do you, non-gestational person, take this person with a uterus, to be your gestational partner for as long as you feel like it?”

That’s not a marriage made in heaven.

Illustration by Linas Garsys in The Washington Times.