On June 2, the New York State Legislature passed bill A8382A/S9316 and sent it to Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY). The legislation systematically removes the words “mother” and “father” from New York’s Family Court Act, domestic relations law, child support statutes, and education law. It replaces them with the clinical terms “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent.” “Paternity” becomes “parentage,” and a “putative father” is now an “alleged parent.”
Supporters call it a modest technical update for same-sex couples, adoptive families, and surrogacy. They cite the 2021 Child-Parent Security Act, which already expanded legal parentage. But if this is mere administrative housekeeping, why erase the original words entirely? “Mother” and “father” already coexisted with gender-neutral definitions. This is not modernization — it is deliberate linguistic substitution.
As a former member of the Georgian Parliament and a senior official in Georgia’s security and intelligence services, I spent more than a decade studying Soviet and post-Soviet ideological subversion. I reviewed KGB archives and saw how authoritarian regimes use language as a weapon to reshape reality. Albany is following that same pattern.
Words are not neutral. “Mother” and “father” are among the oldest and most universal terms in human civilization. They describe the foundational biological, emotional, and moral bond between a child and the person who bears, nurtures, and raises them. In Georgian, these words form the architecture of culture itself: deda-ena (mother-tongue), deda-mitsa (mother-earth), deda-bodzi (the mother-pillar that supports the house), and ded-mamishvili (siblings as children of mother and father). The most sacred oath is “I swear on my mother.” These are not metaphors. They are the load-bearing structure of the language.
This is true across civilizations — from Spanish madre tierra to Italian lingua materna and beyond. Societies encode mother and father into their foundational vocabulary because these bonds are primal human realities. Reducing a mother to a “gestating function” does not expand inclusion. It amputates language and cultural memory.
I learned this on the battlefield. In August 2008, defending Georgia against Russian invasion, I heard wounded soldiers call desperately for their deda and mama when pain stripped everything else away. The same words were spoken on the beaches of Normandy and by American pilots in combat today. These are the deepest anchors of human attachment — beyond the reach of any legislature.
This is the mechanism George Orwell described in 1984 with Newspeak: Control language, and you control thought. The intellectual roots in America trace to Herbert Marcuse, who argued that “liberation” requires suppressing traditional ideas and vocabulary. Unable to win in the open marketplace of ideas, activists seek to eliminate the words in which those ideas are expressed. New York’s bill does not add new terms — it deletes the old ones. The next generation will meet the state through Albany’s sterile neologisms.
New York City already enforces this ideology with fines up to $250,000 for refusing preferred pronouns. This bill extends that logic of compelled speech — punishing people for declining to affirm what they know is false.
Hochul’s office stated that “mothers are mothers and fathers are fathers.” If so, the only honest response is a veto. Yet she is waiting until the end of the year, calculating politics ahead of her 2026 reelection against Republican Bruce Blakeman. That hesitation reveals how toxic the bill is outside activist circles.
New York already grants full legal equality to nontraditional families under the 2021 law. This bill adds no new rights. Its purpose is purely symbolic erasure. Many gay and lesbian citizens I know find it condescending, not affirming. They sought legal equality, not the deletion of “mother” and “father.”
This is not inclusion. It is a state claim of authority over language, culture, and biological reality. It tells Georgian-Americans, Italian-Americans, Latino families, and millions of others that their most sacred vocabulary is now obsolete.
Ultimately, this is a compliance test. When a government forces citizens to use language they believe to be false, it measures their willingness to accept absurdity by command. American institutions are strong, but they require citizens willing to defend reality.
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The word “mother” — deda — was the first word I spoke, as it has been for children across every culture in history. It is often the last word soldiers utter at the edge of life. What kind of political project fears this word enough to erase it from the law?
Hochul should veto this bill immediately. Defending the most fundamental words in human language should not be a difficult political calculation.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former member of the Georgian Parliament (2008–2012) and former senior official in Georgia’s security services. He served as a soldier during Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. His work focuses on authoritarian methods of ideological subversion.