FATHERS, MOTHERS AND ‘FOTHERS’

QLD Senator Ron Boswell - Media Release

October 17, 2008

“We are creating a new class of parent – a ‘fother’,” said Senator Ron Boswell during debate on the Family Law Amendment (De Facto Financial Matters and Other Measures) Bill.

“A fother is a person who is not the mother or father in any physical or biological way or a person who replicates that role in a heterosexual relationship – but a person in a same sex relationship. This bill will establish a legal structure that creates a second parent of the same sex for a child while denying that child a parent of the other sex.”

“But a child is not the biological creation of a same sex couple. That is a biological fiction. So we are left with legal distortions and euphemisms in order to convince ourselves we are treating everyone equally.”

“The government’s proposed amendment to section 60H would effectively give parental status to a lesbian partner of a woman who undergoes an artificial conception procedure—this includes artificial insemination and IVF.  Item 7 of the proposed new schedule 3a of the bill would introduce a new section 60H(b) to the family law act which would give parental status to any person for whom an order has been made under a prescribed surrogacy law of a state or territory. This is despite the fact that surrogacy laws amongst the states are varied and incomplete.”

“The Coalition will be moving amendments to try to improve this situation, but I am concerned that no matter how hard we try we are taking steps here that extend the classification of mothers and fathers to people who are not mothers and fathers. In doing so, we undermine marriage, motherhood, fatherhood and the rights of children to mother and father as we have understood them throughout the whole of the history of humanity.”

Senator Boswell said that there is more persecution of those who are unhappy with this bill than those who are the intended beneficiaries.

“We deceive ourselves when we create by law the fiction that a human baby actually has two mothers. Everyone who is born in this world has been created by a man and a woman.”

“Now we are asked to accept and legislate a new dogma – there shall be fathers, mothers and let’s call them ‘fothers’, for we are creating a new class of parent.”

“Do such statements make me a homophobe who should be reviled and hounded by human rights and anti-discrimination activists? No doubt they do, but I assert my right to say farewell to the nostalgic days of humanity when a child had a right to a father and a mother.”
ENDS

Media Contact –       02 6277 3046