The slippery slope that wasn't supposed to happen once same-sex marriage was granted is making Everest jealous.

In Massachusetts this week, Gov. Mitt Romney has been butting heads with same-sex couples over birth certificates for their newborns. I'll give you a minute to wrap your mind around that concept.

The problem is that birth certificates as currently written reflect archaic notions of procreation, that is, involving a mother and father. Thus, gay and lesbian parents have asked the state to replace "mother" and "father" with Parent A and Parent B.

And we thought Dr. Seuss was just being silly when he created Thing One and Thing Two in his "Cat in the Hat" series.

Romney thus far has prevailed in declining to eradicate the notion of mother and father from his little corner of civilization, noting that all children not only have a right to a mother and a father but, in biological fact, (BEG) do have a mother and a father. Records should reflect that reality to the extent possible, says Romney.

Nevertheless, recognizing that married same-sex couples do have children these days, Romney has been instructing hospitals to cross out the word "Mother" or "Father" and write in "Second Parent" as necessary to accommodate individual cases.
The governor's view is that these altered certificates, while not perfect, at least resolve the immediate issue of recording the intended, if not the biological, parents' names.

Problems arose recently when Massachusetts town clerks suggested that certificates thus altered might not pass legal muster in some circumstances and urged that new forms be created. Although Romney has refused, it's probably only a matter of time before the courts are asked to intervene.

The fuss over birth certificate terminology might seem insignificant in the scheme of things, but words matter. The larger effects of this little two-word change are enormous over the long haul, despite protestations to the contrary, and Romney seems among the few willing or able to articulate them.

Children are born of man and woman. Or so it has always been. Now with technology, sperm donors and "uterobots" - women willing to sell or give away the flesh of their flesh - any random collection of human beings can "parent."

Or so the theory goes.

In one case Romney recently had to entertain, two men - one a sperm donor and the other his boyfriend - became "parents" when a woman gave birth to the donor's child. The two men wanted their names on the birth certificate, with the boyfriend replacing the birth mother. In a bold act of increasingly rare sanity, Romney said "no." Continued...