Lost in the wake of the horrific shootings in Tuc son was a modest battle in the culture war: The State Department quietly decreed that some passport applications would henceforth be gender neutral. No more “mother” and “father”; such terms were apparently too retro, too judgmental for the Foggy Bottom bonzes. Instead, Parent One and Parent Two would do just fine.
O Brave New World, that has such bureaucrats in it.
A backlash quickly ensued, so Secretary of State Hillary Clinton backed away (some), ordering that the terms “mother” and “father” could peacefully coexist with the new “parent” designations on the forms used by American citizens abroad to obtain passports for new babies. But the camel’s nose is now under the tent.
Leaving aside the wretched barbarism of the phrase “gender neutral” — what State really means, of course, is “sex neutral” — the move is another salvo in the ongoing sapper war against American and western cultural norms. Even as recently as a decade ago, it would have seemed absurd to think that words like “mother” and “father” would become politically incorrect, but such is the world we now inhabit.
True, advances in medical technology have redefined the limits of human reproduction, and shifting societal attitudes toward homosexuality have resulted in an increase in same-sex couples seeking either surrogate births or adoption.
“We are confronting situations now that we would not have anticipated 10 or 15 years ago,” a State Department official told Fox News. Predictably in this highly politicized climate, the decision was cheered by gay groups, which welcomed its inclusivity, and protested by conservative Christians.
But there is a larger issue at stake here: At what cost do we turn our backs on thousands of years of cultural history in the name of bureaucratic efficiency?
The recent bowdlerization of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” — one of the most “liberal” novels ever penned, and widely deemed (before the advent of that fascism of the mind known as political correctness) to be the Great American Novel — is just the freshest example of this juvenile cultural self-loathing. There are productions of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” that have edited out all references to the Moor Monostatos’ blackness, lest it cause offense — even though the opera’s principal theme of the struggle of good against evil, day against night and light against darkness has nothing whatsoever to do with slavery or African-Americans.
But cultural vandalism is the order of the day. Like the Bolsheviks rampaging through the manor houses and dachas of the nobility after the Russian Revolution, the PC police gleefully consign history to, well, the ash heap of history, confident that they’re in the service of . . . what, exactly?
For more than two centuries, dating back to Rousseau, the left has been waging an unrelenting war on the wellsprings of Western civilization, as if it were some deliberate, malign conspiracy against an oppressed minority instead of the bulwark against savagery that picked up the pieces of Greco-Roman culture and transformed them into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. No society is perfect, but where would you rather be? Dubuque or Darfur? San Francisco or Riyadh?
Still, if “mother” and “father” no longer have any intrinsic meaning, where are we? And where are we headed?
Of course, they do have meaning, and no amount of linguistic fiddling can change that. Until the day comes when fully artificial children can be created in a laboratory, the yin and the yang of conception remain immutable: Opposites attract, get fruitful and multiply. We may have separated “parenting” from sex, but the sex — and the “gender” — is always there.
That’s why bowdlerization always fails. As Camille Paglia points out in her brilliant (dare I say seminal?) “Sexual Personae,” reality — nature — can’t be denied. It may go underground, where it haunts our dark fantasies, but it’s always there, bubbling beneath the surface, only to erupt later, unfettered, in mysterious and terrifying ways.
Thomas Bowdler, who sought to expurgate Shakespeare’s Elizabethan bawd in order to protect the feelings of Victorian women and children, wound up on that very ash heap of history, an object of scorn and ridicule.
Hey Ma, hey Pa — what will they think of us, a century hence? Parents One and Two want to know.