How a simple word substitute can cause controversy

September 24, 2012 at 11:03 pm · Filed under Different but the same · Posted by Emma

In France, plans are afoot to ban the words “mother” and “father” from all legal documentation. President Francois Hollande has pledged to make same sex marriage legal, and the words will be replaced by the word “parents” in all marriage ceremonies and in the civil code. The plans have caused outrage amongst members of the Catholic Church. Of course, by definition, a “parent” is a protector or guardian, and has the same denotation as “father” and/or “mother.”

The draft law is due to be presented to cabinet members on October 31st.

I wonder if this would have the same impact, or even if people would notice the change, if the main issue here wasn’t same sex marriage?

1 Comment

  1. Frederick Robinson said,

    September 25, 2012 @ 6:30 pm

    What will happen in Spain, where ‘parents’ are ‘padres’ (also the word for ‘fathers’), while Spanish ‘parientes’ are simply ‘relatives’…?

RSS feed for comments on this post