OPPOSITION LEADER Kamla Persad-Bissessar used her pulpit over the weekend to issue yet another startling, tone-deaf call.
Ms Persad-Bissessar, 72, dispensed with the usual pleasantries in her Mother’s Day greeting to call on young women to have children. Failure to do so, she said, could result in “loneliness” and render careers “worthless.”
“There is nothing more completing for a woman than the sounds of her children’s feet,” the UNC political leader asserted. “All humans need love and companionship to achieve their fullest potential; women, in particular.”
Women have so much to deal with, whether at home or at work or even just walking down the street. Must they also add the judgement and prejudice encouraged by such remarks?
To be fair, Ms Persad-Bissessar was clear that she was speaking from personal experience. She also made no claims that she would discriminate against anyone.
But words – even in a trite, otherwise routine greeting – have an impact.
We need look no further than the fallout from the Prime Minister’s assertion, in 2017, that women should be careful about the men they partner with.
Dr Rowley said he was misinterpreted over those remarks, but they did their damage, reinforcing misogynistic attitudes. Just this month, a senior police officer brazenly parroted them almost word for word.
There’s an unsettling congruence between the PNM leader’s faux pas about relationships and the UNC leader’s disastrously inappropriate family planning advice.
Both paint a picture of politicians prying into the bedroom. Both remind us that the State has no business legislating personal affairs.
Yet, whereas Dr Rowley has made a career of getting into trouble for seemingly off-the-cuff remarks, the Opposition Leader’s statements were part of a carefully crafted message.
Within the UNC, Ms Persad-Bissessar has recently responded to sharpened jabs at her leadership from dissidents by resorting to the soft rhetoric of motherhood.
She has decried her critics' “extremism” while saying she “will show everyone tolerance, love, empathy and compassion.” She has warned insurgents that if they don’t hear, they will feel while talking of “the love and loyalty of our great UNC family.”
But as much as she is “Mother” in her party, we detect a worrying lurch to the right in some of the rhetoric of the UNC leader, who recently suggested race is irrelevant to politics and women are not dominated by men. Such positions chime perfectly with Donald Trump’s America, Rishi Sunak’s Britain, and Giorgia Meloni’s Italy.
At precisely the moment when she should be trying to appeal to as many voters as possible, the Opposition Leader seems intent to give birth to, through her thoughtless rhetoric, a vision of an illiberal democracy of degraded ideals. That is the real danger behind her messy words.
The post Messy Mother’s Day message appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.
