Postmen are now postal operatives, judges told, under gender-neutral language makeover
Judges have been told to refer to postmen as “postal operatives” in a push for the court system to use gender-neutral language.
The Equal Treatment Bench Book, most recently revised this month by the Judicial College, provides guidance to judges to ensure defendants, victims and witnesses are handled fairly.
It includes advice on what it describes as “acceptable terminology” in an apparent effort to stop the judiciary inadvertently offending members of the public during a hearing.
Job titles where a gender is implied should be avoided, the guide says, including terms such as postman, air hostess, businessman and chairman.
Instead, judges are urged to refer to “postal operatives” when referring to a postman, or to a “flight attendant” if they are discussing a woman who works on a plane.
“Use gender-neutral language where possible,” the book says.
The guidance similarly warns that referring to a woman as a “lady” or a “girl” can be considered patronising, while care should be taken when talking about disabilities.
Blind or visually impaired people should not be called “the blind”, nor should individuals confined to a wheelchair be described as “wheelchair bound”, judges are told.
The 566-page document has also been forced to revise sections of its chapter on trans people after facing criticism earlier this year for taking its tone from hardline activists.
Policy Exchange called for an “urgent revision” of the guidance in July, expressing concern that it included ideological claims on gender “without warning judges they are hotly contested”.
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Canceling Christmas
In its recently published “Union of Equality” document (pdf), the European Commission demanded that the Commission employees use “gender neutral” pronouns, avoid addressing audiences as “ladies and gentlemen,” and refrain from wishing each other Merry Christmas.
These guidelines, part of a 30-page booklet designed to foster “inclusive communication,” elicited widespread criticism and received an unusually strong reaction from the Vatican’s highest political office. The top eurocrat behind the paper, EU Commissioner for Equality Helena Dalli, issued a statement defending the already printed document as a mere work in progress.
A few days after the document’s publication, European Parliament’s LGBT* Ambassador Riccardo Simonetti added insult to injury when he proudly appeared on the cover of a German magazine dressed as the Virgin Mary. Brussels’ progressives seem to believe the New European Person should celebrate not Christmas but the December holiday season. As the Vatican can’t react to every single act of blasphemy, average European citizens outraged by Simonetti’s irreverence blew up his Facebook page.
This is neither the first nor the last attempt of European leftists to push the boundaries of what’s acceptable and expand their ideological dominance of the public square and regional organizations as aggressively as their American woke counterparts do. But much to the chagrin of those attempting to import the cultural and religious iconoclasm that has ravaged the American public life so successfully, there are Old World nations that still remember Marxism and its assault on tradition and faith.
East-Central Europeans, whose families actually experienced communist dictatorship, know all about ideologues trying to cancel Christmas and foist a totalitarian worldview on them. They have recognized earlier than most the threat of what was happening across the Atlantic when statues were being torn down, books banned or rewritten, and the unity of the nation challenged by racial identity politics and a new class war. They have seen it before.
Communists deliberately erased St. Nicholas, or Santa Claus, from the public forum and introduced “Father Frost” in his place, a secular figure who brought presents for children both on St. Nicholas’ Day and on Christmas. The holiday itself was renamed “Pinetree Festival,” and “Happy Holidays” was to supplant the politically incorrect “Merry Christmas.” Stalin’s birthday on Dec. 18, and not the birth of Christ, was the official “reason for the season.” It was dangerous to talk about the real meaning of Christmas—families observing the holiday in private risked potentially life-changing consequences of a young child inadvertently betraying his parents at school the following day. A reprimand or an outright punishment awaited the parents for contaminating their children with “undemocratic, retrograde, and reactionary” Christmas thoughts.
The attempts by modern apparatchiks, such as Dalli, to cancel Christmas, or of bureaucrat-provocateur Simonelli to pose for a blasphemous picture violate one of the most basic principles of the Maastricht Treaty (pdf). While the EU was to “deepen the solidarity between their peoples while respecting their history, their culture and their traditions,” Hungarians, Poles, and other nations of the post-Soviet bloc that trigger Brussels with their history, culture, and traditions can’t help but notice how hollow these phrases ring.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/cancelling-christmas_4175568.html
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http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
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http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
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