Mind-boggling Arrogance in the Face of Feminism. A quickie.

This isn’t really a ‘post’ as such, it’s just a space to express my disbelief in more characters than twitter allows me.

You may have noticed that the Name Equality campaign has been in the news (you can find them here, and I’ve blogged about their extremely sensible, historically important campign before). The campaign asked for a very simple change to the marriage certificate, to bring it up to date: the insertion of a space for the name and profession of the mothers, as well as of the fathers, of the couple. This information is already on the certificate in Scotland and NI, but England and Wales lag behind. The Deputy Registrar for England and Wales, with spectacular misjudgement, has responded he doesn’t fancy bothering with changing anything.

Now all of this is annoying enough. But the cherry on the cake, for me, is the response I found the the Telegraph article published today:

“The certificates have always allowed for the Mothers name and job. This seems to be a campaign for the sake of a campaign”

Yes, really.

There are people out there so stupid, and so knee-jerk anti-feminist, that they simply cannot process the idea that any feminist campaign might have a point. Let’s just take a minute to consider this, shall we? This is a person, with access to a keyboard and the capacity to type, who has accepted without a murmer the idea that a professional woman, a national newspaper, and the deputy registrar of England and Wales, are all three of them in a conspiracy to lie about the content of a publicly available document. For what reason? For no reason.

Isn’t that just stunning?

Imagine the depths of arrogance you would need to write that post, and the level of security you’d have to have in your own rightness. Now imagine that depth of arrogance in everyday conversation. And people wonder why we’re still living in a world where women find it harder to get their voices heard.

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