The Problem - and Charm - of Inclusivity

Who cares if a NSW school ditches Mothers' Day for Family Day?

The problem - and the charm - of inclusivity is that it strips everything of meaning

Take the decision by Hunter Valley Grammar School in NSW, for instance, to rename its traditional Mother’s Day Stall a “Family Gift Stall”.

The decision, blasted by mums, was made “for inclusivity reasons”.

Well, isn’t everything about inclusivity these days?

The school explained that they wanted to avoid upsetting “some of the children from non-traditional families who have two dads or may not have a mum present in their lives.”

We can’t have Mothers Day! Why not? Well because you wouldn’t want to upset children, would you?

Do you hate kids?

So, because some children don’t have a mother, no children get to celebrate Mothers’ Day.

Instead, the school has replaced the specificity of Mothers’ Day with the banal generality of Family Day.

Inclusivity is charming in that it purports to include everyone. Who wouldn’t support that?

Family Day - and by ‘family’ we mean any and every possible combination and arrangement of human beings you can possibly think of - guarantees that everyone is included.

The problem, of course, is that the event created to include everyone must be so broad that it effectively becomes meaningless.

If everything is a family, then nothing is a family.

Little wonder so many parents at Hunter Valley Grammar reckon “Happy Family Day” rings a little hollow.

Inclusivity argues that because some people can’t be including in something, everybody must be included in nothing.

It is a doctrine of the progressive left that appeals to people’s better angels, but only in order to strip meaning from everything.

Only when all boundaries have been erased, and all definitions made redundant, will the progressive left be contented.

Then, and only then, will they be free to do whatever they want, free of judgement and with nothing to remind them that they are standing with feet planted firmly in mid-air.