Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, New York legislators pass a law replacing “mother” and “father” in portions of its legal code with “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent.”

Read that again.

A mother is now a gestating parent. A father is now a non-gestating parent.

Some people will immediately rush to assure us that this is just legal terminology. Just bureaucratic housekeeping. Just a technical adjustment to account for modern family arrangements.

I don’t buy it.

Have you ever hear the expression, “the law is a teacher”?

Every law teaches us something, whether it be Mosaic law or our civil law. Every statute communicates values and every legal definition tells citizens what their government considers normal, good, important, and worthy of protection.

Civil legislators understand this perfectly well when they pass anti-discrimination laws, hate crime laws, environmental regulations, or public health mandates. They know the law shapes culture because they frequently say so.

Yet somehow we’re expected to believe that replacing “mother” and “father” with sterile, clinical, mechanistic language carries no cultural message whatsoever.

Come on.

If the law teaches, then it’s the leftist lunatics in New York who are doing the teaching. They’re teaching that motherhood is not important enough to be named. They’re teaching that fatherhood is not important enough to be named. They’re teaching that the words mother and father are obstacles to be managed rather than realities to be honored.

Think about how bizarre this actually is.

For thousands of years, across civilizations, languages, religions, continents, and political systems, humanity somehow managed to recognize that children come from mothers and fathers. Those weren’t parental job descriptions or interchangeable functions. And they weren’t temporary biological roles that could be reduced to a medical process.

They described relationships and identity. A mother was not merely someone who gestates. A father was not merely someone who provides sperm.

Only a culture intoxicated by radical liberal ideology could convince itself that these definitions represent progress.

The language itself feels cold. Artificial. Manufactured in some fluorescent-lit conference room where every natural human relationship is fed into a bureaucratic shredder and reassembled as administrative jargon.

“Gestating parent.”

That phrase sounds like livestock inventory. And that is precisely the point. When they want to diminish something, they begin by renaming it.

Words matter because words carry meaning. They carry assumptions. They carry values. They carry memories. Mother and father communicate things that “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent” simply cannot. The old words acknowledge the unique and irreplaceable roles of men and women in the creation and raising of children. The new words flatten those distinctions into generic biological functions.

This is what happens when the left takes a sledgehammer to reality. The defenders of these changes will say nobody is stopping anyone from calling themselves a mother or father.

Maybe not today. But that misses the point entirely.

The question is why lawmakers feel compelled to remove those words from the law in the first place. Governments do not spend time rewriting language they consider valuable. They rewrite language they consider problematic.

That should tell us everything.

When the state ceases to speak of mothers and fathers, it is revealing what it believes about mothers and fathers. The lesson being taught is crystal clear—the state no longer sees those categories as fundamental. It no longer sees them as necessary. It no longer sees them as worthy of special recognition.

And when the law teaches people that mothers and fathers are optional categories, disposable categories, embarrassing categories, society eventually begins to believe it.

The tragedy is that reality doesn’t care. Every person reading this has a mother. Every person reading this has a father.

The state can rewrite its statutes. But it cannot rewrite creation.