Friday, March 10, 2006

One. That's a groundswell, right?


If it's coming from those on the Canadian right, maybe we can just call it "newsiness." Let's start with the slack-jawed, drooling outrage here where, if we follow the link to Fox News, we read:

Revisionist Rhymes

Some nursery schools in Oxfordshire, England, have taken offense to classic nursery rhymes like, "Baa Baa Black Sheep" so they're teaching children to sing, "Baa Baa, Rainbow Sheep," instead. The Times of London reports teachers have also dropped the seven dwarfs from the title of "Snow White," and changed the ending of Humpty Dumpty — letting all the king's men put Humpty back together again after all. The manager of two area nursery schools says he's just promoting equal opportunity, saying, "No one should feel pointed out because of their race, gender, or anything else."

Whereupon, because this just begs for a closer examination, we further follow the trail to the Times Online article, where things now become a bit clearer:

Instead of singing “Baa baa, black sheep” as generations of children have learnt to do, toddlers in Oxfordshire are being taught to sing “Baa baa, rainbow sheep”...

Stuart Chamberlain, manager of the Family Centre in Abingdon and the Sure Start centre in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, told the local Courier Journal newspaper: “We have taken the equal opportunities approach to everything we do.

Ah, there we go -- this new attack of political correctness run amok is, in fact, the result of a single manager of two different day care centres but let's not stop that from extrapolating the silliness to the entire shrieking, moonbat left, shall we?

In any event, surely Chamberlain is only buckling under the strain of massive and crippling public pressure. Oh, wait:

A mother whose daughter attends the Sure Start nursery at the Family Centre in Abingdon, who did not want to be named, said parents had been astonished by the change.

“Baa Baa, Black Sheep has been one of the most well-known nursery rhymes for generations. For people to come along and fiddle with it is ridiculous. What on earth is a rainbow sheep anyway?

“I’ve spoken to other parents about it and none of us has ever heard of anyone getting offended by the words ‘black sheep’.”

By way of analogy, of course, one could tar the entire ideological Right as hate-filled, homophobic, racist bigots because, well, this guy exists. But that would be unfair, so we won't do that.

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