238
Executive order bans gender-neutral language in Arkansas government documents
(fayettevilleflyer.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
238 points (94.7% liked)
News
23281 readers
3449 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The Old Testament literally doesn't contain gender neutral language, which is a large part of why this all is so messed up in the first place.
Hebrew didn't have a neutral gender.
There was no 'parent' just 'mother' or 'father.'
So a number of passages ended up super weird as a result, including the "he made them male and female" in Genesis 1 where a plural God makes humans male and female in 'his' image.
Which was the key line that's been used for millennia now to prejudice against gender nonconformity, including its being cited in the NT regarding marriage in works written just a few years after the emperor of Rome married two different men.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy
Edit: Expanding on this as some people seem to be confused....
The article is only about the etymology of the word:
The etymological fallacy is thinking that the etymology relates to the contemporary definition, which is what the commenter was doing in confusing the etymology of woman or man as being somehow connected to its meaning.
In general, the commenter was mistaken, as while it is true that a number of stories in the OT were likely based on earlier concepts of neutral or multiple genders (such as the example I originally gave), from the earliest Hebrew onwards there was literally no way of representing it.
So you ended up with later reinterpretation of passages with binary gender like the Genesis 1 example as having related to a hermaphroditic original man (Philio and the later Naassenes) given it was in the image of what was supposedly a singular God but rendered male and female both. Whereas what's more likely was this passage dated back to the days of a divine power couple of Yahweh and his wife which was later reworked into a monotheistic form without updating the creation of men and women in their images.
But the topic of binary gender representation in the language is fairly broadly discussed and is distinct from what the commenter is trying to represent as being similar in languages with neutral gender representations with some bizarre appeal to etymology.
I suspect it was even the driving concept in the 1st century behind the comments about "make the male and female into a single one" in the Gospel of Thomas saying 22, which ironically still elsewhere referred to the 'Father' as opposed to 'Parent.' (Aramaic was also a binary gendered language.)