Posted on June 15,
2016
Damning Dad
Father’s Day Pledge is appalling
by
Daniel
Clark
Happy Father’s Day, you sadistic, sociopathic
brute! That’s essentially how the
holiday is being observed here in Pittsburgh, a city that is plunging into full-blown,
banana-brained liberalism at warp speed.
Since 2014, political and business leaders have been
signing onto the “Father’s Day Pledge to End Gender Violence,” along with
popular local sports figures like Pirate manager Clint Hurdle, and longtime
backup Steeler quarterback Charlie Batch.
If you don’t understand what “gender violence” means, that’s understandable,
because liberals are still in the process of making it up. If they really sought to end such a thing, it
might occur to them to simply avoid creating it and save themselves a lot of
trouble.
The
pledge, drafted by an outfit called Southwest PA Says No More, starts out
nonsensically, and becomes increasingly ill-defined from there. It begins, “I will work to end gender
violence and pledge to: Not use violence
of any form in my relationships.” It’s
hard to imagine any man taking such a pledge who would have any reason to do
so. Even if he did, who’d believe him? After all, he’d have probably spoken similar
words before.
Loath as feminists may be to admit it, most men do not
assault women. Those who do would not be
dissuaded from violence by having taken the pledge, and would likely react
violently to being asked to do so in the first place. To the average American dad, a pledge not to
beat up mom is unnecessary to the point of being meaningless. You might as well ask him to sign a promise
not to transgobulate any pindeazels. Mind you, the words themselves are
practically irrelevant, because liberal activists can be counted on to expand
and reshape their definitions in order to produce the desired outcomes.
The pledge requires fathers to “speak up if another
man is abusing his partner or is disrespectful or abusive to women and
girls.” This is nothing more than an
attempt to enlist new recruits into the liberal speech police. Within one sentence, violence is subsumed by
the somewhat broader category of abuse, which is then conflated with
“disrespect” – a term that is characterized primarily by verbal offenses.
To the countercultural Left, everything that is
traditional is disrespectful toward women.
If you address a gathering of women as “ladies,” you have disrespected
them, which is the equivalent of an act of misogynistic violence, as it is now
being defined in this pledge.
The
Southwest PA Says No More website explains the importance of “primary
prevention,” which it defines as “stopping violence before it occurs.” Among examples of primary prevention, it
lists, “Challenging stereotypes about what men and women are supposed to be like.” So, if you butt into a married couple’s
conversation because the husband is joking about how much his wife talks on the
phone, you may assume that you’ve prevented him from committing an act of
violence against her, based on the longstanding feminist principle that men are
guilty until proven innocent, and probably even then.
The next item in the pledge is to “Be an ally to women
who are working to end all forms of gender violence.” Okay, so we’ve established that “violence”
encompasses lots of things that are not remotely comparable to actual
violence. We also know that “gender” is
no longer synonymous with one’s sex.
Nowadays, there are no fewer than eleventeen
genders, instead of just two, and if you dispute that, you are probably guilty
of “gender violence” already.
If a man says he identifies as a woman, then referring
to him with masculine pronouns would be an example of “gender violence,” would
it not? Surely, the authors of the
pledge would consider that to be disrespectful, which is presumably the same as
being violent. To confront the disrespectful
person would just as certainly fall under the rubric of “primary prevention.”
None of this does any good for women who are or may
become victims of domestic abuse or sexual assault. It only serves to validate the liberal prejudice
that treats all men, and especially men from traditional nuclear families, as
criminal suspects. Father’s Day, then,
is no longer an occasion to celebrate fathers, but is instead an opportunity
for them to atone for their sinister existence.
Like the rest of liberalism, the Father’s Day Pledge
to End Gender Violence is completely untethered from reality. In a way, that’s too bad. It would be nice if we could at least believe
it was true that “Southwest PA Says No More.”
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press