The Scottish Parliament clearly is underworked and overpaid. It has laboured long and hard into the night and passed some of the most significant legislation ever to be debated and approved in that hallowed place.
Confronted with a raft of weighty issues of moment and history it has passed into law a matter so significant it would have revivified John Knox himself had he not long ago passed from the sight of mortal men.
Scotland’s Parliament has made the decision to ban “gingerbread men” from a coffee shop at its capitol over concerns that the name of the cookie perpetuates sexism. Each of these cookies will now instead be called a “gingerbread person,” according to an article in Express.Precisely what this will actually do or achieve for women is unclear. However, it is almost certain that the radical move will result in trivialising discrimination against women. The Parliament has managed to make discrimination against women not a weighty matter of state, but the butt of a sarcastic joke. Congratulations, Holyrood.
Herein lies the point. By making institutional discrimination against the female sex such a matter of moment that the phrase "gingerbread man" must needs be outlawed at its local coffee, the Parliament has served to achieve just one weighty goal: it has held itself up to public ridicule. It's just one more example of the law of unintended consequences at work.
Our advice would be for all Scottish women and men to rise up and condemn the Parliament for its trivialising of the female sex. That might serve as a truly positive outcome. A second positive result which we hope will fast-follow the first would be for the Scottish parliamentarians to be hit with at least a 20 percent reduction in their parliamentary salaries, if not substantially more.
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