More chicanery in The Hague came to light on Monday, when Dutch lawmakers were caught red-handed as they sought to replace the word ‘mother’ with the awkward phrase “parent from whom the child was born.”
According to the Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij (SGP), a conservative Calvinist party which discovered the change, the proposed amendment was hidden in a so-called ‘comprehensive bill’ designed to make several adjustments to existing laws in one fell swoop.
Usually such aforementioned adjustments are minor and technical in nature, correcting misspellings, changing punctuation for better readability, or improving references to other laws or articles—not this time!
Should the bill have been formally adopted, all mothers on the civil register would suddenly find themselves—with some surprise, no doubt—to be a “parent from whom the child was born.”
This ugly new definition could have slipped in unnoticed, as the advisory text accompanying the bill states that it is “not expected” that “this will lead to much discussion in the House,” since “the bill contains only technical changes.”
Fortunately, Dutch and Flemish conservative politicians and members of the dissident Right commentariat were on hand to point out that this change is not a mere matter of semantics. Expressing support for the SGP’s resistance to “this woke madness,” Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) chairman Geert Wilders added:
Naturally the word “mother” should remain in the civil register. Get out of here with your “parent from whom the child was born!”
Filip Dewinter, a leading Vlaams Belang MP in the Flemish parliament, spoke of “yet another woke attack on the family as the cornerstone of our society.”
Dutch political commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek pointed out the deviousness the lawmakers employed. “They thought no one would notice. The madness knows no bounds,” she wrote.
Following the backlash, Dutch Interior Minister Hugo De Jonge (Christen-Democratisch Appèl, CDA) took to X in an effort to mend the damage.
Referring to the conspicuous alteration as an “unnecessary mistake soon to be rectified by an amendment” (since submitted to the House of Representatives), De Jonge said “the word ‘mother’ is beautiful and deserves a place in our law. Now let’s get back to work!”
Despite these assurances, the SGP—alongside many others—demands answers, with its chairman Chris Stoffer seeking a formal debate on the matter to be held in parliament. “This [bill] would have passed if we had not discovered it. Surely, this is madness. We want to know the underlying reason,” he said.
SGP MP André Flach, whose aide had detected the proposed change, deemed motherhood, and “thus the word mother,” to be of “great value to a great many women.”
Flach pointed out that “now they want to scrap the designation [of mother] for everyone anyway, while for a small group [of transgender people] a solution [in the form of an exemption] was already present.”
The SGP MP sees nothing less than “an ideological agenda” in the proposed change. “This symbolizes a broader movement that believes words like husband, wife, father and mother should be barred from the public square.”
For now at least, we have avoided saying ‘goodbye, Mother.’ The willingness of gender ideologues to smuggle changes like these into law means we will need to keep our wits about us.
