In a ‘70s song, ‘mother’ was half a word. To Cherie, it’s not even that (although, as a throwback to my American past, I sometimes use it to describe her hubby-wubby).
Obsolete words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ should, according to her, be replaced by ‘parent’. This constitutes a seminal contribution to our language, rivalling those made by Shakespeare, KJB and Dr Johnson.
Cherie hasn’t quite enlarged on the full ramifications of her proposal, but then it’s too sweeping.
Love Labour’s Lost would have to be rewritten to say “My parent’s wit, and my parent’s tongue; assist me!”, while Hamlet would first talk to the ghost of his parent and then make his parent poison themselves [sic].
And don’t get me started on the Bible. About time we upgraded those texts to say “Parent, forgive them” and “Our parent who may or may not be in heaven”. All in all, ‘father’ appears in the Bible 879 times, and ‘mother’ 245, so there’s work to be done.
Actually, Cherie’s proposal has more to do with politics than linguistics, as she explained: “I think we shouldn’t be talking about mothering or fathering – we should be talking about parenting… what I think is very encouraging… is we see young men now who are much more hands-on fathers than their own fathers.”
The statement springs from deep conviction, and Cherie is much more committed to progressive doctrine than Tony is. Tony would apply for dual membership in UKIP and BNP tomorrow if it suited his purposes.
Cherie, on the other hand, isn’t a politician but a greasy eminence (as they say in French). So she can afford to have the power of her feeble convictions, one of which is that men and women aren’t just equal but identical, some physical fixtures notwithstanding.
Actually, making that qualification Cherie inadvertently struck some reactionary notes: “… obviously women physically give birth…”.
That’s being shamefully retrograde. Thanks to modern science, a man can now give birth too, provided he used to be a woman who decided she was really a man, had herself modified accordingly, but kept her uterus as a little keepsake.
Essentially Cherie is proposing to change God’s design. That’s fine, it’s even commendable, but what’s reprehensible is that she also proposes to overlook the real gospel of modernity, Darwin’s slipshod theory, which, according to Richard Dawkins, explains everything.
Actually, one feels ashamed even to mention science, which has produced piles of microbiological, physical, cognitive, behavioural, physiological evidence on the differences between men and women.
Science is nowadays an extension of politics too. If science says or, worse still, proves that male and female brains, among other things, are different, it must be ignored or ideally outlawed.
For example, physiology tallies with my empirical observation that men’s minds are more logical. This isn’t to say that no woman is capable of sequential thought – only that in my long life I’ve met 10 men endowed with that ability for every one woman.
That makes men better at philosophy, while women are better linguists (witness Cherie). Offhand, I can only name one significant woman philosopher (Elizabeth Anscombe) and perhaps half a dozen insignificant ones. But women hold their own in management and politics, which both benefit from their innate housekeeping skills.
But we aren’t talking about the face value of the argument. We’re on the subject of its politics, and Cherie’s views put into practice have produced a social equivalent of Chernobyl.
An ideological commitment to making women work full-time is greatly responsible for the destruction of the family. For it takes about £35,000 a year to replace the services provided by a full-time mother (female parent?).
Given our tax brackets, a woman would have to be on at least £50,000 just to break even, more to get ahead. These days, such salaries require commitment above and beyond – so who’s going to look after the children? An emasculated man, half-committed to his own job, and therefore half-paid?
A family where both parents go to work doesn’t get two salaries: typically it gets one salary split into two. That certainly happened in the only industry where I ever drew a salary: advertising.
When Cherie’s bra-burning progenitors drove women to work back in the late ‘60s, it became legally unacceptable to keep them out. Agency bosses were perplexed: they could create the odd job here and there, but certainly not enough to accommodate the influx.
Hence they started paying men less, which had the knock-on effect of forcing women to work: men were no longer capable of providing for the family. This destroyed the organic family relationships wired into our DNA by the combined efforts of God and Darwin. That’s to say it destroyed the family.
This is definitely a factor in more than half the marriages ending in divorce and half the children being born out of wedlock. It’s also a factor in zero-sum population growth: every time a baby is born, a man disappears.
Words are cheap, but dear at the price. Progressivist nonsense spouted by the likes of Cherie is sociocidal every which way, but what does she care? Ideology comes first. Really, Cherie and Tony deserve each other.