Federal deputy José Medeiros (PL-MT).| Photo: Pablo Valadares/Chamber of Deputies.

Federal deputy José Medeiros (PL-MT) said this Tuesday (24th) that he called the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) to prevent the use of neutral language in official means of communication of the Lula government. The request was forwarded to the Attorney General of the Republic, Augusto Aras, and to the Attorney General of Justice of the Federal District, Georges Carlos Frederico Moreira Seigner, informed the advisory of the parliamentarian.

Agência Brasil, the federal government’s official news website, began using neutral language in some of its content. In an article published last Friday, with the title “Elected parliamentarians meet for the first time in Brasília”, the author of the text mixed, in some sentences of the text, the spelling changes adopted in the neutral language, not foreseen in the language portuguese.

“We request urgent measures from Organs competent bodies to prevent the use of so-called neutral language by the Agência Brasil de Notícias, the portal of the EBC – Empresa Brasil de Comunicação that provides public broadcasting services and manages federal public radio and television stations -, as it attacks the Portuguese language abolishing the masculine and feminine genders, fundamental for the formation of the family and the development of children and adolescents on biological and non-ideologized bases”, said Medeiros in the document sent to the PGR.

In a note, the deputy argued that “it is up to the prosecutors of the Republic and Justice to act in cases of diffuse and collective interests and rights, protection of the family, children and adolescents”. He also considers that “the PT government is doing the country a disservice by using the structure of the state to murder the Portuguese language by trying to impose the neutral pronoun”.