Department for External Church Relations
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Metropolitan Hilarion: In the USA, traditional family structure is being deliberately destroyed
The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives has stated that from now on in the Congress there is no room for such obsolete notions as mother, father, daughter, etc. All terms, as well as pronouns will be gender-neutral. Thus, instead of “chairman” they will just say “chair,” instead of “grandson” or “granddaughter” they will be using universal “grandchild,” and so on.
Commenting on these novelties, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations, noted that echoes of these discussions could be heard in Russia as well. For instance, disputes are under way as to the necessity of gender-specific job titles. “In the Russian language, as a rule, feminine names are applied to women, and masculine ones to men. Although there are exceptions. For example, the noun “professor” is masculine, but it can refer to both men and women. The word “writer” is also applicable to men and women, albeit for women there is the word “authoress.” Yet, some women do not like to be called authoresses, reckoning that they should also be called writers. All this is largely a matter of taste. Marina Tsvetayeva, as far as I remember, used to say that she was not a poetess, but a poet,” the archpastor pointed out.
“However, when from the sphere of taste all this moves to the sphere of politics, the situation gets much more serious, because disappearance of such fundamental notions as mother, father, son, daughter, brother, sister, etc., from the political lexicon is not just a sign of new fashion or new tastes, but an evidence of deliberate and wilful destruction of the traditional family structure,” Metropolitan Hilarion added.
In his opinion, such steps cause greater alarm for the U.S. Congress, as well as for the American society as a whole. “Despite all the political trends and craze for political correctness, the American society is essentially very traditional. In America there are great many believers, many large families with a father, mother, son, daughter, brother and sister, and in no way they are going to give up either these names or traditional form of family. The further away the political elite will be from the people and the political discourse from what constitutes people’s life, the harder it will be for the American politicians to hold on to power, I think,” the DECR chairman said in conclusion.
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