The reason given by Christiane Taubira, France’s justice minister: ”Who is to say that a heterosexual couple will bring a child up better than a homosexual couple, that they will guarantee the best conditions for the child’s development?” She then reassured critics of the proposed law, “What is certain is that the interest of the child is a major preoccupation for the government.”
If the law goes through, then all references to “mother” and “father” will be erased from the civil code and replaced with the more abstract, cover-all, cover-anything term “parents.”
Let’s focus on that shift to abstraction. It’s more important than you might think, because, as France is now demonstrating, he (or she) who controls the language controls the fundamentally human ability to speak about reality.
Amusingly enough, this article, which bangs on about the evils of “abstraction”, fails to give anything but the most abstract sense of the actual effect of the proposed change the author describes. Quite apart from any question of same sex marriage, where does a law need to talk about “mothers” and “fathers”? What legal rights and obligations ought to be different for mothers than for fathers?
The only way I ever get addressed in official letters is “Dear Parent or Guardian.”
Sorry, but the French government is WRONG!