In the early morning hours of August 1, 2024, after a conference committee from the two chambers of the Massachusetts legislature reconciled the differing versions of the forty-two-page House Bill 4750, both the House (156-0) and Senate (40-0) passed “An Act to ensure legal parentage equality.”
Among its provisions, the bill, which had bipartisan support, removes the words “mother” and “father” from Massachusetts’ parental recognition laws.
Gov. Maura Healey, who described Massachusetts as “proud to be a national leader and trailblazer when it comes to LGBTQ+ equality,” promised to sign the bill into law.
In light of the significant changes this bill introduces, this column briefly highlights its key provisions before reflecting on how it may impact American families and society.
Massachusetts House Bill 4750
After becoming the first jurisdiction in the nation to legalize same-sex marriages in 2004, Massachusetts was the last state in New England to update its forty-year-old parental recognition laws to secure the rights of non-biological parents. Representative Hannah Kane, chair of Massachusetts’ Caucus of Women Legislators, and one of the bill’s co-sponsors, described the proposed bill as making “significant strides toward supporting children born through assisted reproductive technology [such as surrogacy or in vitro fertilization] and ensures equality for LGBTQ families to establish parentage,” The changes modify current law requiring nonbiological parents to complete adoption procedures to secure full parental rights.
House Bill 4750, on its face, purportedly seeks to ensure legal equality for all parents in updating Massachusetts’ law by allowing individuals who give birth or their representatives to file complaints to establish paternity, support, visitation rights, and/or child custody.
The bill’s most controversial provision, which has received relatively limited national attention to date, seeks to alter family structures that have existed since the beginning of time by dropping the word “father” and replacing “mother of the child” with the “person who gave birth.”
The bill also changes “child born out of wedlock” to “nonmarital child” along with referring to an “alleged genetic parent.” Advocates celebrated these modifications as “a long time coming.”
“Diversity” at the service of elimination and division
In adopting House Bill 4750, just as it did in legalizing “same-sex marriage”, Massachusetts again assumed a role front and center in the culture wars over whose values will prevail. As such, it seems evident that Massachusetts’ elected officials have taken aim at Christian and traditional beliefs, and related values, at the basis of American civil society.
On the one hand, giving the bill’s supporters such as Hannah Kane the benefit of the doubt, it is understandable that she and the other proponents maintained that “our laws need to be updated to reflect the diversity of families.” However, in “updating” the law, its backers failed to offer a cogent rationale why the bill made such a conscious effort to eliminate the use of “mothers” and “fathers” in its descriptions of “diverse” families.
Against this background, House Bill 4750 must be viewed in light of ongoing legal battles challenging the rights of parents and people of faith who are unwilling to violate their long-held sincere religious beliefs in the face of issues involving sexuality. For example, people of faith were denied opportunities to adopt and/or serve as foster parents while others lost custody of their minor child who sought to transition because their religious values prevented them from supporting the LGBTQ agenda. Further, believers are challenging a state law in California that trammels parental rights by banning public school officials from informing them when their young seek to change their pronouns and/or sexes without their approval.
A glaring unintended irony surrounding the passage of House Bill 4750 is Representative Kane’s call to update Massachusetts law “to reflect the diversity of families.” How does removing “mothers” and “fathers” from the bill or adopting a term such as “persons who give birth” accomplish this supposed goal of inclusiveness? If anything, the bill’s ignoring mothers and fathers simply erases them from the law, essentially rendering them non-persons. And, how does redefining families by excluding “mothers” and “fathers” accomplish House Bill 4750’s espoused goals, described by Polly Crozier, director of family advocacy at GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders, a national political action group, as “demonstrate[ing] that fairness under the law is for everyone”?
Rather than promote unity, the statutory exclusions of mothers and fathers in House Bill 4750 cynically do just the opposite. Aware of the power of language, combined with the often-stated adage that “words have meaning,” these changes are more likely to divide families and individuals by explicitly ignoring parents and domestic structures that have long served as the basis of civil society, not just in the United States but throughout the world.
In explicitly excluding caring mothers and fathers who are crucial to the development and well-being of their children from the new parental recognition law, House Bill 4750 will do little more than further divide, rather than unite, Americans.
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It has been said that all revolutions are based on hatred of the father…
“Robespierre was a key mover and shaper of the French Revolution before it got totally out of hand and turned on him as well. His inadequate sense of fatherhood was probably shaped by his own out-of-wedlock birth. He was abandoned by his own father. The influential philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau, trumpeted political equality while also abandoning his own illegitimate children to orphanages.
“Today the psychologist Paul Vitz researches such nihilists or atheists as Friedrich Nietzsche and our modern evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins. He finds that in neither case “do we find a strong, beloved father with a close relationship with his son or daughter.” Even the atheist Sigmund Freud said that psychoanalysis “daily demonstrates to us how youthful persons lose their religious belief as soon as the authority of the father breaks down” (Paul Vitz, “Faith of our Fathers,” Ignatius Press, 1999).”
Total excerpt from Beaulieu, “A Generation Abandoned,” Hamilton Press, 2017. Author interview at https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/03/29/a-generation-abandoned-why-whatever-is-not-enough/
Makes perfect sense.
Now let’s make sure that they eliminate “payment,” “liability,” “levy,” “remittance,” “disbursement,” “debit,” and, “compensation,” from the tax legislation.
Leave it to Massachusetts.
To any un-woke citizens of Massachusetts: Move (as quickly as you can).
No one should have any doubt that Democrats like Kamala Harris would bring this to federal law the first chance they get. Right now, a fractious Republican House and the inability to get 60 votes to overcome a Senate filibuster stand in their way. Giving Republicans Senate control would strongly bolster the bulwark against any such ideas. Bottom line is that most Democrats think (or at least will vote) that male father and female mother are “cultural constructs” that “science” does not consider essential to healthy childrearing. Two androgynous (i.e., same sex) “parents” suffice, and that parenthood need not even be biologically based. As we see in states where commercial surrogacy has been rammed through (take Gretchen Whitmer’s Michigan, for example) there is a marked Democratic preference for “parent” being a state of mind, i.e., the person who “intends” to exercise a parent-like child-rearing function vis-a-vis a child, not one who actually has any blood ties. So, the surrogates who purchased the baby are the “parents” and the Dems will tell you “there are all kinds of families” and “family equality” requires that we “respect” the mishmash of children’s lives created by no-fault divorce, surrogacy, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization of whose gametes, etc. So, yes, while it’s good you point out the Massachusetts situation, this perversity is coming to a government near you whenever you turn it blue.
Yes indeed, it’s coming soon to a theatre near each of us if the Democrats win.
Agreed
John – I think it is important to point out that this parentage equity act passed in Massachusetts with at 40-0 vote in the senate which has four republicans and 156-0 in the house which has 25 republicans. Some republicans went to bat for it especially over the issue of IVF which the present Trump campaign has also stepped up to the plate for. When I was younger the Republican party in MA still had a pro-family, pro-life, basis until about two decades ago when it decided to give up on the social issues a little at time to “gain votes”. This little-at-a-time approach has begun with the populist republican party: in favor of gay marriage, in favor of IVF for gay couples (OK with killing embryos) in favor of abortion if the people so decide – with no national intervention. This national Republican party still has some ways to go, but (authentic) Catholic voters are within their rights to be suspicious of it, especially if they live in Massachusetts which no Republican on the national stage really cares about. Right now the national Republican party rates a mild PG (Catholic parents “somewhat” cautioned). If conservatives keep giving here and there to the evolving populist morality they may find that the political theatre has completely shut down to them.
Everyone, please go read Carrie Gress’ piece today over at “The Catholic Thing.”
I can’t help but wonder how many of those advocating the “deconstruction” of the traditional family are actually raising their own children in a non-traditional setting? I’m guessing most of them have intact traditional families, and even if there has been a divorce or separation, the children spend time with both male and female parents on a regular basis, along with grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. Consider the Obamas–Barack and Michelle were married (and are still married!), and their two daughters were obviously their pride and joy, and even today, we see their family gather together for holidays, vacations, etc. on a regular basis. And even our entertainment community–the A-list stars–value and love their families (their parents) and their children–the Mother’s Day episode of Saturday Night Live included the mothers of all the cast members, who expressed their love and gratefulness for their moms on the show! I personally think the deconstruction of the family is not so much an agenda of the rich and famous as it is a fantastical and demonic plan of the wanna-be-rich and the resentful/angry rejected.
Mrs. Sharon, tell me you’re just joking.
Mrs Sharon, I’m sure people in Hollywood love their children and it’s good to know how many respect their mothers but have you looked at some of the very sad outcomes for families there?
I know similar things happen everywhere these days but the entertainment industry is an especially difficult environment to raise children.
Unfortunately, this is certainly consistant with the state of birth and upbringing.
As the Greeks put it, “those whom the Gods destroy they first drive mad.” This is the final stage of the insanity which has been destroying our nation and other so called developed nations since the advent of the sexual revolution in the 1960’s.
Thanks, all, for joining in.
We must do all we can to resist such actions. It will not be easy but God is, I pray, still on our side.
God bless,
Charlie
“It has been said that all revolutions are based on hatred of the father.”
In this case, it is a revolution based on hatred of both the Father and of the Mother, depending on whether one has chosen to discriminate against a Father and thus Fatherhood, or a Mother, and thus Motherhood.
I am a Massachusetts resident. Families come in all shapes and sizes. I am so proud my Queer friends can get married and raise children. So glad that unlike the Catholic Church which still believes women should be seen and not heard I live in the year 2024. If the Catholic Church refuses to change it is doomed to failure. When that happens I hope all the churches get turned into affordable housing which would be the best thing the Catholic Church ever did.
Ellen – Your “Queer” friends can’t get married. They are not married. They can cohabitate and gain the acknowledgment of a government upheld by unjust laws and a citizenry that no longer recognizes the natural law, human nature, and basic biology, but they cannot have a conjugal union. They can raise children, but they still can never have children (not even the intervention of fertility treatments) without the introduction of a third or fourth party which only reinforces that they cannot marry, unless of course they distort the reality of marriage based on a false worldview. “Gay marriage” can be sustained only by a the pig-pile of untruths. By passing this act what your community has created is a surrogacy market for children. Many years ago, I sat in between two lesbians at a work conference and one said to the other: “Isn’t it better with children?” Your “queer” friends are using children to prop up a self-centered fantasy that does not exist in nature and which cannot exist unless you manufacture a new dictionary of terms. You cannot defy the natural law and someday all of this is going to come crashing down in a landslide of pain for all involved. Even now, I know so many professional, intelligent women coming into the Church, and I have been preparing them for their sacraments. They come because the Church is a place of glory and respite from the false reality you and your friends are perpetuating. Even if you met your goal of parish properties being turned into affordable housing your folks would only turn these into dumping grounds for neglected souls because your secular thinking starts from a place of total ignorance concerning human dignity.
The Catholic Church is and will continue be a success precisely because it doesn’t change. We are one of the few remaining institutions that advocates for and supports all children of God.
And “Affordable housing” is…neither.
Families come in all shapes and sizes. To insist on language such as “mother” and “father” is painful and bigoted. I fully support changing any law that implies or outright diminishes the status of a child. The fact remains, some children have two mothers, no mother, two fathers, no fathers, or just one. And they may not be biological at all. This is a good thing. Bigotry needs to end.
Joe!
You wrote: “To insist on language such as ‘mother’ and ‘father’ is painful and bigoted.”
Actually, no. The mother is the female whose ovum develops into the child. The father is the male whose spermatozoan fertilizes the ovum.
This is not optional. Whatever “size and shape” the child’s family might be, the above scenario is how every human life begins.
No exceptions.
You then wrote: “I fully support changing any law that implies or outright diminishes the status of a child.”
I cannot tell you how thrilled I am to hear you say this. I totally agree with you. Abortion is the most horrific holocaust mankind has ever witnessed.
You then wrote: “The fact remains, some children have two mothers, no mother, two fathers, no fathers, or just one. And they may not be biological at all.”
Um, every child has a mother and a father. The mother and/or father may or may not be present at any given moment, but no child is ever begotten by any human lineup apart from one mother and one father.
And they are always biological. Every person everywhere is biological.
You know adoption & any form of being a parent should first be in the child’s best interest. Not the adult’s. Children are not a commodity. They have a right to not purposely be denied a father or mother.
It seems easier to pay some poor 3rd World woman to be a bondservant & carry a child to term than it is to “adopt” a pet these days. Have you ever seen the lengthy questions on dog “adoption forms”? And home visits are required by some “rescue” agencies. I mean seriously…I wish we’d take as much trouble worrying about children & surrogacy as we do about stray dogs & cats.