TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
Last week’s column was a rant about people who insist on thrusting their sexual orientation into the public domain. I personally do not care which category you fall into, it is your business and yours alone. Just be glad you live in a part of the world where the choice of who you sleep with is nobody’s business but yours.
However, with the acceptability of any kind of group being a family, comes a whole new problem involving political correctness.
The latest problem related to this matter was reported in an English newspaper last month. Apparently someone raised an objection to schoolchildren being given the materials to draw and colour cards for Fathers’ Day. Instead children were told to make a card for their Special Person.
Apparently someone thought that it would be offensive to call a child’s daddy her father, which makes no sense to my old fashioned mind. I know that lots of male figures in the family are not real “fathers” in the sense of being there at the moment of conception, but does this really matter? Shouldn’t the person who offers the shoulder to cry on, the lap to sit on and the protection of a father figure be considered the child’s father?
In many families there is no male figure in the picture, either divorce, death or other circumstances makes a single mom have to be both mom and dad to the children, and Father’s Day is not celebrated, but does this mean that other families have to change their appreciation of a daddy?
Many dads are managing to bring up the children alone, that doesn’t make them mothers, but just the best possible single parent he can be. Whatever makes a family is different in some homes but as long as it is the best possible situation for a child, who is to say what makes a family. A family is made up of people working together to provide a strong, safe unit to grow up in, as long as love is involved who is to say what is right or wrong as to the make-up of the family.
In same sex marriages both men probably want to be a dad rather that one being called mom and this probably applies to two mom families as well. Whatever they choose to be called is their prerogative.
I get really frustrated with the people who spend half their life looking to find offence in what name is given to any particular person. We are all so frightened of being branded racist, homophobic, ageist, sexist, or whatever other “ist” that can be dreamed up. There is a difference in being offensive and in being “real”. If you choose to live a different lifestyle than what is considered the “norm”, that is your choice and more power to you, and it is no-ones business what you think you should be called.
The politically correct police are always looking for offence when none was meant and coming up with new titles for the category that they would like people to be sorted into. Why can’t people just mind their own business, accept others for who they are and let us all get on with the business of living in harmony? Life is too short for political correctness to take up valuable time.