Well, yesterday’s optimistic hanging washing to dry in the garden came to an abrupt end when I went to hang the second load out. It had started to rain. So, willy nilly, the washing had to be hung to dry indoors: most unsatisfactory!
It rained more or less heavily for most of the rest of the day. Then at around 6.00pm the sky cleared and the sun came out. We seized the moment and went for a walk.
Within 15 minutes of our returning home, the clouds moved back in and the intermittent rain began once more. Today is wild and windy - mostly dry when I set out running but rapidly turning drizzly. Watch out for falling trees! We have got off lightly though; some parts of the country have had floods!
I’ve never been to the USA but because it features in so many films and TV series it often seems that I know the country quite well. I don’t think I am alone in this. We also have a tendency to think that Americans are ‘just like us’ but with a different accent. After all, Geordies and Scousers have different accents but still are largely the same. Increasingly I think this is not the case with our N. American cousins.
I’ve been reading things about Americans who think that women should never have been given the vote!
Braeden Sorbo, a 24-year-old conservative influencer, claims to have been told by lots of women that they wish they had never been given the vote. “I know more young women today who say they wish they didn’t ever get the right to vote than I’ve ever talked to in my life,” Sorbo recently told Richard Harris, host of the Truth & Liberty YouTube show.
His statement doesn’t even make sense but you get the idea. Even if it made sense, surely it hardly counts as a properly conducted survey.
His goal, ultimately, is a “voting system based on Christian morals, which relates to married couples having one joint vote. So it’s not ‘Oh, women shouldn’t vote,’ it’s that women should vote with their husbands and husbands with their wives.”
Those “Christian morals” and “Christian values” keep cropping up.
It’s not just young conservative influencers though. There’s also this sort of thing: Last month apparently the US defense secretary, Pete Hesgeth, shared a video on X in which several pastors say women should no longer be allowed to vote as individuals. “In my ideal society, we would vote as households,” one of the pastors in the CNN clip says. “I would ordinarily be the one to cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.” While Hegseth didn’t explicitly endorse the video, he did retweet it with the caption “All of Christ for All of Life.”
Somehow The Handmaid’s Tale becomes much more plausible.
But then I suppose it’s not that long ago that women were considered too feeble of intellect to bother their little heads about important matters. They needed their father’s or their husband’s permission to open bank accounts and so on.
Even ‘professional’ women were restricted, as this set of 1914 rules for female teachers shows.
However, maybe things have changed since then. I found this little snippet:
“Girls who play after-school sport in the UK are 50% more likely to get top jobs later in life, according to research, which reveals that the boost is equivalent to a university degree.
Despite this benefit, girls are far less likely to play sport than boys, with 11- to 18-year-olds each missing out on 1.4 hours a week, or 280m hours annually, with 340,000 more girls excluded due to cost and lack of local access, according to the research. One in three girls surveyed for the report said boys had access to a wider range of sports.”
Still not an even playing field though!
Finally, here’s a cartoon comment on the state of the world:
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
No comments:
Post a Comment