Smashed promise

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

Scottish Government to women (on International Women’s Day): sucks to be you.

You can see how important this is. It’s about how easy it will be for the cops in Scotland to haul women off to the police station because they defend their rights. It’s about whether women in Scotland will have any freedom at all to talk about their rights when purported “trans rights” are in competition.

In other words they’re politely asking for the promised Notes, and getting no response.

Finalised? The notes are finalised? So what happened to that promised that MBM and others would be included?

So there you go. “Yes yes yes bitches we’ll keep you posted on what we work out. Kidding, no we won’t.”

It’s just breathtaking.

Comments

5 responses to “Smashed promise”

  1. Rob Avatar
    Rob

    In my experience politicians do not like breaking promises. But where the rest of use see breaking promises as an moral or ethical matter, for politicians it’s calculus. If it’s a promise they don’t want to keep, they have to calculate whether the harm to them by keeping the promise is worse than the harm to them by breaking the promise. They’ll not be at all worried by the effect on the people they made the promise too. Any chagrin they feel will be entirely at themselves for having been foolish enough as to have made a promise publicly that they didn’t want to keep.

    So, I’m not surprised. I’m not even disappointed, because that would suggest that I expected otherwise. Disgusted, yes. I’m definitely disgusted.

  2. Brian M Avatar
    Brian M

    Can I just question the very concept of legally enforced hate speech laws? Cancel culture and culture sequences for bad thought is one thing, but it should it be against the law to be a bigot? Do we really want the police to be going after this?

  3. Roj Blake Avatar
    Roj Blake

    tl;dr

    Scots women get fucked.

    Many a Mickel makes a muckle.

  4. NightCrow Avatar
    NightCrow

    The most disturbing thing is that there is a real fear that simple statements of truth may henceforth be treated as ‘hate speech’. I read through the report of the meeting of the Justice Committee which is linked from one of the tweets.

    Lucy Hunter Blackburn:

    The cabinet secretary invited us to say what behaviour we thought might not be caught by the provision on discussion or criticism. …

    We are not clear that the provision on discussion or criticism would cover saying that there are two sexes or that sex is immutable. Would it cover saying that a woman is an “adult human female” and that the word “woman” can be used as a sex-based term? I am not going to stop anyone else from using it differently, but I should be allowed to use it as a sex-based term. Would it cover saying that third-person pronouns can be sex based, and that that is not criminally abusive? I am not sure whether any of those statements amount to discussion or criticism.

    Is it discussion or criticism to assert:

    “Women have sex-based rights, Only women can get pregnant, A lesbian cannot have a penis, The census should collect data on biological sex.”?

    That has been described to me as a hateful position to take.

  5. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Thank you for that, Night Crow.

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