Ho ho ho! ... Ick.
England's clearly gone mad this holiday season.
BBC NEWS | England | New Santa clauses introduced: Santa Claus must have a minder to watch over him when he meets children, under the latest guidelines issued by Rotary clubs. Father Christmas must be accompanied when meeting children, even if parents are present. If there is no "minder" then he is being told he must go "off duty". The guidelines also say Father Christmas should no longer have a grotto and he should only shake hands with children, avoiding other physical contact. The Rotary Club has introduced the interim measure while a new code of practice is drawn up and follows child protection legislation earlier this year.
BBC News | Nativity video ban: A school in Bedfordshire has banned video cameras from its nativity play, because it's worried that the images may get into the hands of paedophiles Head teacher at Sundon Lower School, Sue Stokes, has told parents in a letter that she is worried that photographs might get into the wrong hands.
You know ... there's protection of children, and then there's complete and utter idiocy.
I understand the Santa regulations. I think they're perhaps a shade extreme, but I understand them. (And they're actually for the legal protection of the Santa suppliers, and not at all for the protection of children, but we'll just leave that to the side, shall we? Let's shall.) The video ban, however, is utterly and absolutely nonsensical.
Even if it were true that the pictures taken by parents of their own fully dressed children (and considering most nativity plays, quite voluminously dressed, at that) ... so what? (Those of you who may be about to have keyboard frenzied fits should just settle down.) In general, letting pedophiles have pictures of real children is probably a very bad idea, yes. But they can obtain pictures of fully dressed children anywhere. You can pull them off videotapes. You can get them out of catalogs. The only thing banning pictures of a nativity play will get you is thoroughly pissed off parents.
And if the parents themselves put images of their children up on a personal web site and a pedophile passes by and thinks, "Hey, cute kid"... how is that the teacher's or school's fault in any way whatsoever? For that matter, how is that the parent's fault? How much do you want to hold parents and children responsible for the ill will of some independent third person?
This is just DUMB.
Posted by iain at December 17, 2002 05:57 PMComments
Of course we hear all sorts of excuses for banning Father Christmas and Nativity plays. But I think the real reason is the ruling class' plans for imposing Godless Communism on all of us in readiness for their global corporate one world government (New World Order). They only want us global slaves to worship and serve them.
Posted by at December 21, 2002 07:20 PM
