See-saw, Marjorie Daw

Public opinion, for what it's worth, can seem like a see-saw, up and down, up and down, but in a larger sense it's more like the scenario most of us can remember from actually being on a see-saw as children. Once the bigger kid gets on the end, that see-saw stays put, the tiny one stuck in the air, the bigger one with bum firmly on the ground.

Take racism for example.
I am not arguing that racism doesn't exist, far from it, I have seen it in action and it is a very ugly beast. But there was a time when it was more embedded in our culture, that it was perceived to be the norm and that only a minority of trouble makers would challenge it.

Now, it may well be that black people are under-represented in boardrooms and parliament just as women are, but you cannot be openly racist, if people are still telling jokes about blacks and nursing hatred in their souls, they must do it in the privacy of their own toilets. It can be and is challenged. This scenario could not happen today...

A group of so-called religious leaders protest outside Parliament, that the government must not pass a bill sanctioning the equal treatment of blacks and whites. They distribute leaflets describing improbable situations where ordinary white citizens are not allowed to deny black people entry to their own homes or that hospitals and clinics must put them first for healthcare ahead of white folks, in short, a whole mess of made up stuff which the law that the government has carefully crafted does not in any case allow.

Of course that would be entirely unacceptable. Who among us could go to Synagogue or Mosque and pray with, or to Church on Sunday and take communion with a bunch of people who had done such a thing?

Well why the hell is it different because instead of black people we are talking about gay people? Why is homophobia any more acceptable than racism? How and why, instead of those people who claim to have faith wrestling with their own prejudices and begging their God to remove this stain from their soul, do they bare their evil for all the world to see? And why do the rest of us have to be tarred with their filth?
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian makes the case so much better than me. I'd love to just copy and paste her entire article, but that would be insulting all round. I'm not Polly Toynbee, I didn't write it and if you want to read her you can go to the Guardian website.

In a similar vein, Sarah Louisa Phythian-Adams has written an extremely well-argued and readable article on the F-Word site about misogynistic linguistics. She urges us to bring the whole subject of the way we use language back onto the stage. We are always dismissed whenever we talk about the effects of anti-woman language, she is so right.
She uses the same argument as I have just done to make one of her points. She reminds us of the Yorkie ad which used the catchphrase 'not for girls'. Quite rightly she points out that they could not have said 'not for Jews' or 'not for black people'.
Be warned, I have a whole post on language bubbling under, not necessarily from this same angle, but I was pleased to see such a comprehensive discussion of the topic, especially as I had e-mailed the site a few months ago and commented about the problem. I received a reply agreeing wholeheartedly with the points I had made and telling me that a post was to be forthcoming. This was well worth the wait.