Simona Baldassarre, a Member of the European Parliament for Matteo Salvini’s League, has denounced a new glossary from the European Union that allegedly directs members to stop saying terms like “mother” and “father”.
Baldassarre spoke out against the EU suggestions for what language should be used in internal and external communications, such as refraining from using the terms “mother and “father” but using instead “parents”.
According to the MEP, the new communications guidelines also instruct EU officials not to use the term “gay marriage” but opt for the phrase “egalitarian marriage”, according to Il Giornale.
The words male and female are also reportedly called into question in the new glossary, with “sex assigned at birth” to be used instead of “biological sex”.
“As a politician, as a doctor, and as a mother of a family, I am outraged,” Baldassarre said, continuing that behind the “anti-discrimination communication lurks the violence of the one-rainbow ideology that the EU wishes to impose”.
“A new religion with priests, theologians, ideologues, and scribes. The technique is well known: you change words, you overturn meanings, you introduce a new language that changes people’s way of thinking,” she added.
The populist MEP’s allegation comes after the European Union declared the political bloc an “LGBTIQ Freedom Zone” after a 492 to 141 vote in the European Parliament.
The declaration was largely seen as a counter to Poland’s Regional Charters of Family Rights, which declare marriage is between a man and a woman, which the European Parliament accused of being a “narrow definition of the family”.
Polish MEP Ryszard Legutko, of the governing Law and Justice (PiS), later criticised the EU’s declaration as “absurd” and said: “Western Europe is engaging in ideological propaganda. At kindergarten age, you want to introduce ridiculous stories about gender.”
Baldassarre’s comments echo those made by Matteo Salvini in 2018 when he served as Italian Interior Minister and changed identification documents to list mother and father rather than parent one and parent two.
“I was told that on the interior ministry’s website, forms for an electronic identity card had ‘parent 1′ and parent 2’,” Salvini said, adding: “I immediately made them change the website restoring the definition of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ — it is a small gesture, but I will do everything possible that it is provided for under the Constitution.”