[Trigger warning: violence against children, murder]
From a Conservative Party leaflet rife with other goodies like “changes to alliances … should only be done after careful consideration” and “It’s fact that quality time, baby with mother (or sometimes dad), in the early years is enormously significant …” the winning sentence has to be:
It’s time to get back to common sense and acknowledge that reasonable force is necessary and sometimes beneficial for some children.
Mr Q and I were watching an episode of Forensic Files or some other generic crime show. Two teenaged boys murdered their parents, and threw a party with their parents’ bodies wrapped up in plastic in the basement. Yet all the members of the community who were interviewed were just shocked and puzzled, just couldn’t think of a reason why these kids would do this. The parents were good parents, you know, brought those boys up right, it was all just a huge mystery.
When the kids talked about the murder, one of the things they said was that they waited for their mother to leave the house, then turned on the stereo. Because they knew the very first thing their mother would do on entering the house would be walk over to the stereo, turn it off, and yell at them.
You can either take from this that maybe our society can have a slightly fucked up idea of what “good parenting” constitutes, and maybe we have a tendency to label some kids as “bad kids” [before they murder their parents] and thus justify parents being “harder” or “stricter” because “the kids need discipline”, so maybe take a slightly dim view of the idea that two teenagers just magically became homicidal against their saintly caregivers …
… or, you know, you can believe that from the moment they are born, some kids are just so inherently evil they need to be struck by their parents.
I normally don’t like to make these calls, but I’m pretty sure I can assume which side of that argument Jesus would have been on.
Hmmm, like the family court judge in the US who “spanked” his daughter across the legs with a belt for 7 minutes (she caught it all on tape) and claims he was just disciplining her. Apparently she was on the internet when she was told not to. Yep, born evil obviously.
If they aren’t obedient little automata they must be damaged, obvs.
Another bit that riled me was the “sometimes dad”. Why only sometimes? Found that somewhat creepy.
Yep, it’s pretty telling. Obviously dads only need to step in when silly, weak women fail to understand their proper role or something.
Either that or they initially just wrote “mum”, and someone had the sense to say “hang on, the evil feminists will rip us a new one over that!” but they still couldn’t quite erase all traces of their acceptance of rigid gender roles.