What a sad world it would be if language were solely about communicating clear, distinct meanings.

Whereas MEN can skip TOWN after IMPREGNATING a WOMAN and start writing RANTS on SLASHDOT with completely arbitrary CAPITALIZATIONS on how unfair life is. My bad: I mistook the Stone Age for the 19th century.

Again: both sexes can choose not to procreate. Nothing to see here, move on.

Since the concern should be for the child and its welfare, the only reasonable rule should be that the leave belongs to the child, for its parents to allocate as they see fit. Who else should decide for them how best to care for their own?

And does it really matter against whom this is discrimination?

Sorry, is that the 19th century on the phone? I can't quite hear you: you seem to have misplaced your genders.

A man chooses with whom to have intercourse. There are cases where the intent was not to procreate; but that is still a risk a man or a woman takes deliberately. Claiming that a man does not get a choice of whether to be a parent is a considerable overstatement.

Seriously? I thought contraceptives and vasectomies weren't outlawed in the US yet. Nor gender reassignment, for that matter, for those who would be moms (in the non-biological sense, at the current state of technology, naturally).

You believe maternity/paternity leave is solely about medical recovery? And not, say, about bonding with and nurturing the child? Because that's the only way this would not be discrimination.

Fun side note: here in Sweden (yeah, right, we're all borderline commies here, so you can automatically discount anything we do, and we do pay taxes through the nose and several other orifices), not only do both parents have the right to paid leave, to the tune of 96 weeks, but four weeks are dedicated to each parent, lest they forgo it entirely. Our honest-to-goodness socialists here are campaigning to enforce parents' splitting them down the middle... and have the temerity to claim this would be an 'individualized' leave.

Is the analogy really that hard to understand, or are you being deliberately obtuse?

If I say, 'I do not have a faith, in your or any other God', you seem to reply 'Well, that's a faith too.' How, precisely, is that different from my saying 'I do not participate in any sports' and your replying, 'Well, not participating is your sport.'?

Unless you really don't know the difference between 'belief' and 'faith', you're merely juggling semantics, using words like the great philological authority Humpty Dumpty, to make them mean what you'd like them to. That can be fun, but is basically a form of mental masturbation: something you really shouldn't indulge in publically.

In exactly the same way that avoiding playing football is a sport.