In a move that would make George Orwell blush, New York lawmakers are pushing to erase the words “mom” and “dad” from state statutes, replacing them with the sterile, bureaucratic labels “gestating person” and “non-gestating person.” Governor Kathy Hochul now holds the pen on this linguistic lobotomy, and if she signs it, every official document, form, and statute in the Empire State will be scrubbed of the most basic human relationships. The stated goal is “inclusivity,” but the practical effect is to turn parents into interchangeable biological functions—an exercise in ideological wordplay that treats the family as just another outdated social construct to be deconstructed.
For the 2A community, this isn’t some distant culture-war sideshow; it’s a warning flare about how far government will reach when it decides language itself is a policy tool. The same officials who want to redefine motherhood are the ones who already treat the Second Amendment as an annoying relic to be regulated into irrelevance. When Albany can’t even bring itself to say “mother,” it’s hardly surprising that it also can’t bring itself to say “shall not be infringed.” Both impulses spring from the same impulse: centralized power deciding which words—and which rights—are still permissible. Gun owners who shrug this off as mere semantics are ignoring the pattern: once the state controls the dictionary, controlling the gun safe is just the next administrative step.
The deeper implication is cultural disarmament. A society that can’t even name its own mothers and fathers is a society that has already surrendered the foundational relationships that make self-reliance and individual responsibility possible. The right to keep and bear arms doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it rests on the assumption that citizens are competent adults capable of protecting their own families. Strip away the language of family and you strip away part of the justification for why an armed citizenry matters in the first place. New York’s proposed redefinition isn’t just bad policy—it’s a deliberate step toward a world where the state is the only parent left standing, and the only one allowed to be armed.