German Family Minister Kristina Schröder, a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, has upset fellow party members by suggesting that God go gender-neutral:
In an interview with the weekly newspaper Die Zeit in which she discussed gender roles in children’s literature, Schröder also took on God’s gender, and fellow members of her Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, are not impressed.The German language has three definite articles for nouns to indicate their gender — der (masculine), die (feminine) and das (neuter). The noun der Gott , or God, is masculine. But Schröder told Die Zeit that the article for God shouldn’t matter. It could just as easily be the gender-neutral das Gott , she said, saying the article “doesn’t mean anything.”
Schröder also took on the sexism of the Grimm fairy tales (“There are seldom positive female figures there”) and racism in classic children’s literature.
Said Bavarian Social Minister and Christian Social Union member Christine Haderthauer, “This overly cerebral nonsense leaves me speechless. I find it sad when our children, due to blatant insecurity and political correctness, have the strong images that are so important to their imaginations taken away.”
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