The 117th Congress opened yesterday (01/03/20) with a prayer, as usual. What wasn't as usual though was the way that opening prayer ended. Yes, it actually ended with "Amen and Awoman". I'll explain what Congress obviously doesn't seem to understand.

A few days ago Congress announced a proposed change to the rules of the House of Representatives saying they want to move away from gender identifying terms as mother and father, son and daughter, and aunt and uncle. Instead, the rule change proposes those terms be changed to more gender-neutral terms such as parent, child, sibling and parent’s sibling.

You can read more about these proposed changes at nypost.com.

In an effort of equality, the members of Congress have also made the decision to modify their opening prayer, and have begun ending that prayer with "Amen and Awoman".

Before I go any further, let me say that I completely support equality, of all kind. I believe everyone of any race, gender, religion, sexual preference, etc deserves equality and respect, and anything less than that should never be tolerated, in any form.

That being said, I guess our elected members of Congress don't actually understand that "Amen" has nothing to do with gender.

"Amen" is a Biblical Hebrew term meaning "so be it". Sure, it actually contains the letters arranged in a way that spells "men" but, it has absolutely nothing, at all, to do with gender.

By this logic, then I guess saying something like shiitake mushroom should now be considered is using foul language because it almost contains the word shi...well, you know.

If there is something I'm not understanding about why this is a logical and important change, by all means, please let me know what I'm just not getting here.

While I applaud the effort and the acknowledgement of the importance of inclusion, this is so ridiculously off the mark I didn't believe this was actually true when I first heard about it.

Pretty sure this not the way we wanted 2021 to start.

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