This blog does not provide services to women who wear certain head coverings. If you are a female Viking, your browser will no longer work properly and you will be redirected to more suitable web addresses.
Here are the reasons:
1. I am a white dude and it’s my god-given right to treat with suspicion anyone I damn well please.
2. If you’re a female Viking, I’m doing this for your own good. Clearly, you didn’t choose to wear those clothes of your own free will. You must have been forced to wear them, probably by some oppressive husband or father-figure. Or maybe you’ve internalized the demands of an oppressive culture. Whatever the reason, I’m a nice white liberal who’s here to save you from your silly culture. And as a bonus, I’m going to give you equality whether you want it or not.
Nevermind that I don’t know anything about being a Viking. Nevermind that I know almost as little about being a woman. You deserve my charity and protection.
3. Everybody knows that female Vikings want to beat the system by engaging in identity theft. If they wear those head coverings, then I won’t know if my server is displaying my blog to the correct person. Somebody else might be viewing my page and that would be bad. I have no idea why that would be bad, but then again, it’s MY blog so I’m allowed to be as stupid as I please and you can’t do a damn thing about it.
4. Female Vikings might in fact be terrorists. Those who play Brunhilde in Wagner operas have been known to shatter glass and eardrums. They could wreak havoc. They could destroy our social fabric. So we should deny them access to essential services — just like we did 60 years ago to those suspicious-looking Japanese people. Yes let’s repeat history. Let’s make people miserable for no good reason at all, then, years later when we realize how stupid we’ve been, let’s apologize and give them ludicrously small amounts of money and hope they don’t complain.
5. If they wear those funny-looking head-coverings, they might not be able to learn to speak our language. I don’t know if that’s true. I just thought I’d add it to the list and hope you actually believe it.
To learn more about a striking example of institutionally sanctioned racism in Canada, check out the following resources:
No To Quebec Provincial Bill 94 (now a password protected blog)
What causes me to despair is that a significant proportion of Canadians support Quebec’s Bill 94 and would be happy to see something similar applied federally. See MacLean’s “About Face” for more.
(Apologies to readers who identify as Viking.)