Despite Tel Aviv being crowned by many as the gay capital of the Middle East, it seems Israel's government ministries are still playing catch up behind antiquated views and guidelines.
Guy Sadak Shoham, 33, and Chai Aviv Shoham, 38, had applied for aid from the Ministry of Social Affairs to send their two daughters to preschool, they explained to Ynet.
In a tired and at times exasperated tone, a government representative told the two fathers “not to read too much into this,” as she asked them “which of you is the mother?”
“I understand that you are both fathers and understand that you both run a shared household, but there is always the one who is more dominant: Who is more the mother?” She explained.
“We consider these concepts old-fashioned,” the couple said. “We do not necessarily blame the representative – she is ultimately subject to guidelines and as she said [in the call], they are the state’s. It is also sad that the state's definition of a mother is someone who works less and is at home with the children, and that we must choose which of us meets that definition."
This is not the first time the couple has encountered such issues, but on prior occasions there was no insistence on the matter.
"It happened in the past when we filled-out bureaucratic forms,"they said. "We needed to write one of our names under the mother's name, but we just deleted it and wrote Dad. We do not intend to cooperate with this. We will contact them and ask to change the form.
“We think it is delusional that the state wants an affidavit signed by us saying that one of us is the mother," they added.
In response, the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry issued an apology and said that such an incident would not happen again.
“We apologize for the unfortunate failure and, following your request, we have refined the procedures with the call center so that they will not occur again. They do not reflect the department’s policy,” the written statement said according to Ynet.
“We will emphasize that the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry practices explicitly treat all types of families and grant equal rights to all,” the ministry went on.
But Ohad Hizki, the director-general of Israel’s National LGBT Task Force, told Ynet that this was "an insufficient apology to change long-standing discrimination.” He said, “The Labor and Welfare Ministry must sharpen its procedures immediately to prevent recurrence of cases of this kind, as other public organizations have been able to do.”
In the Middle East, Israel is touted as a Western-style democracy, yet laws and procedures lag behind for the LGBT community.
In 2018, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flip-flopped on a contentious surrogacy bill, which expanded eligibility for state-supported surrogacy to include single women but excluded single men and gay couples. Previously, state support was only given to married heterosexual couples.