The proposal by the English pro-LGBTB association Stonewall to replace the term "mother" with "parent who gives birth" did not take long to meet (thank goodness) with massive opposition, even from sectors that could be described as sympathetic to the cause. It is a coincidence, moreover, that this association has long been in the crosshairs of British society, since its impositions and demands in public bodies "are giving rise to a sort of 'culture of fear' among workers who do not agree with gender ideology in its now infinite versions".
It is not a stretch to say that in our society we see more than a few examples of a maternity-phobic current that tries to erase any positive sign of motherhood or fatherhood. Examples such as the mistreatment at work of those who have children or those articles that blame every disaster on the number of children and extol the wonders of life without "family burdens" up to the proposal of laws that, dressed in a supposed equality, are nothing more than the imposition of an effective discrimination for any natural family - male - female - from whose relations one or more children are born.
Eliminating the word mother or father from our language is not a simple change of vocabulary; it implies an attempt to change the nature of things. As Charles J. Chaput points out: "The meaning of terms like "mother" and "father" cannot be changed without doing the same, in a subtle way, with that of "child". More specifically, the question is whether there is some higher truth that determines what a person is, and how human beings should live, beyond what we do, or what we choose to describe as human."
To end with the reference to our origin, to the givers of our life - physical, spiritual and social - because our parents are the first educators of society - hides, in a not very subtle way, a selfish idea, of total autonomy, detached from any other to whom we may owe something, in this case, the premise of all rights, which is life. The human being is self-conceived separately: there is no father or mother who are perceived as the conditioners of life, but simply a succession of personal choices and feelings that are those that shape, outside any natural ecosystem, life, personality, relationships, gender....
We live in a society of "not being" but of feeling and, as the British psychiatrist and writer Theodore Dalrymple points out in his essay "Toxic Sentimentalism", the question is not whether there should be feelings or not, but "how, when and to what extent they should be expressed and what place they should occupy in people's lives". Feelings, without the basis of reason and truth, end up acting like a hurricane that can sweep over us in such a way that we forget even our origins, even erasing "out of respect", out of a false charity, essential truths for the happiness of human beings, whether in politics, culture, education or Sunday dinner conversation.
Benedict XVI points out in Caritas in veritate that "without truth, charity falls into mere sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell that is filled in arbitrarily. This is the fatal risk of love in a culture without truth. It is easy prey to the emotions and contingent opinions of the subjects, a word that is abused and distorted, ending up meaning the opposite." This is, perhaps, the crux of our society, in which the conquest of "freedoms at all costs" have become equally unworthy prisons in which attempts are made to hide the fact that we are the children of fathers and mothers who must respond to the inheritance of real freedom received.
