Earlier this year, there was a short right-wing freak-out when the State Department announced that the spaces for “mother’s name” and “father’s name” on passport applications will be replaced with “parent one” and “parent two.”
The State Department quickly backtracked but that wasn’t good enough for Rep. Randy Forbes who quickly introduced legislation to require the use of “mother” and “father” on all federal forms.
Today, Forbes showed up on “Wallbuilders Live” with David Barton and Rick Green to discuss the importance of stopping these sorts of changes at the source while Barton warned that is was an example of the unholy contaminating the holy:
Barton: And it really is important. A little bitty deal like changing the mother and father designation on a passport, those are not small deals.
Green: Even though it sounds small, isn’t it a fundamental change? It’s really at the heart of this question of is the family going to continue to be the major nucleus of our culture and is there a definition of family and marriage that we’re going to stick with or are we going to go to anything counts?
Barton: Well, it becomes death by a thousand paper cuts, is what it amounts to. Nothing really enough to cut to the bone, but you just bleed to death a drop at a time. And that’s what this is because you say “man, we’re so busy with the President trying to get DOMA defended, we don’t have time to mess around with what they’re writing on passports.” Well, when it comes at you from a hundred directions, you may repel ninety-eight of the attacks, but if two of them get through, that’s two more than you had when you started this thing. And those are attacks that you have to push back on every single one of these fronts one hundred percent of the time. You cannot give ground.
The minor prophets talked about the fact that if you take something holy and put just a drop of unholy in there, does the holy make the unholy become holy? Or does the unholy make the holy become unholy? And the answer is: the unholy contaminates the holy.
Forbes: The other big thing that we’re worried about is, as you know, the slippage of these kinds of things and how they work their way in and then ripple throughout all of government. If we let this stand, the next thing we know is there’s going to be another agency that does it and then another agency and then before you know it they’re going to come back and say “we’ve done this with the State Department and we did it with such and such. We ought to make it in all federal documents everywhere.” And that’s the way these things happen unless you try to put them out at the source.
And the other thing, imagine with children. You know, for how long have we said “who’s your mothers?” and “who’s your father?” and now we’re going to say “well, who’s your parent one and who’s your parent two?”And these are the kinds of things that have huge ripple effects through the federal government if gone unchecked.
