ATTLEBORO, Mass. -- Tag, you're out! Officials at an elementary school south of Boston have banned kids from playing tag, touch football and any other unsupervised chase game during recess for fear they'll get hurt and hold the school liable.
-- "Not It! Mass. Elementary School Bans Tag", The Washington Post, October 18, 2006
Expatriate curmudgeon Fred Reed had this take on a similar egregiousness a few years back:
There is a totalitarian strain in the female psyche. It isn't evil, at least not in intention. Quite the oppposite -- in intention. Women as a sex want to impose security, stability, and conventionality, at all costs, on everything. They want a tyranny of the safe and comfortable. [...]
When the female drive for security ceases to be a useful brake on male energy, and becomes instead the dominant principle of existence, the effect is stifling. That is what we have. A guy principal, unless gelded, will let girls be girls and boys be boys. A gal principal wants them both to be girls. A man will not try to force girls to play football. A woman will try to force boys to stop playing it.
Because what is instinctive seems reasonable, few women have the foggiest idea what makes men tick. (Or, God knows, vice versa.) Some do. Some women scuba dive, jump out of airplanes, shoot competitively. The average teacheress doesn't. She can't imagine why boys like roughhousing, or hard-played basketball, or guns. When she says tag is too rough, she means that it is too rough for her.
And with an intolerance peculiar to the sex, she believes that anything she can't understand must be reformed.
-- Fred Reed, "Children in shards on the ground"
UPDATE: A passing commenter points out that, although this incident is in Massachusetts, it is a general phenom; not particularly blue-statish or even political in nature. He's right, on further thought. I've seen the same thing happening around here.
