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LGBT rights and pro-pit-bull advocacy are niche passions for the Ontario NDP’s Cheri DiNovo. The latter cause was my introduction to the MPP. Today’s column is about the former, specifically the recently passed Bill 28, DiNovo’s “All Families are Equal Act.”

Motivation for the bill was the aim of bringing legislative compliance to a 2006 judicial ruling, in the case of MDR v. Ontario, to stop requiring same-sex couples to adopt their own children if they used surrogates or reproductive technologies. That, Bill 28 does. It also allows parenting agreements among as many as four people.

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But DiNovo went further still. In deference to transgender activists’ opposition to binary gender categories, her bill replaces most uses of the words “mother” and “father” in Ontario law, substituting for them “birth parent” and “parent.” According to DiNovo, “the right of people to be called neither mother nor father” is “equally important” to the right to be called mother or father.