The government is Mother, the government is Father.

Four months ago there was the woman judged (by some officious local authority pricks, natch) too stupid to be a parent. Now we have, courtesy of an entirely different yet probably quite similar bunch of officious local authority pricks, a wedding called off because the bride has been judged too stupid to get married. I've read it several times now and it still feels like I've dropped through a space-time wormhole linking Earth to the planet Cunt.

Social workers...

It would be, wouldn't it. The annoying thing, well, one of the annoying things, about it is that I've known a couple of social workers and I have a lot of respect for them. They do their best and they work hard and are passionate about what they do, and I feel terribly sorry for them when some shit munching authoritarian cuntspasm who shares a job title with them makes their whole profession look bad.

Social workers banned a young woman from her own wedding in an extraordinary row over whether she is bright enough to get married.
Kerry Robertson, who has mild learning difficulties, was told her wedding was being halted just 48 hours before she was to walk up the aisle with fiance Mark McDougall.

Two days? Nice touch, very nice. You're all heart, aren't you? Cunts.

Miss Robertson, 17, had bought her wedding dress and the couple had booked the church ceremony, bought the rings and organised a reception to be held last Saturday.
But two days before they were due to say their vows in front of 20 guests, social services told the bride-to-be that she would have to cancel the big day because she 'did not understand the implications of getting married'.

Given the UK's divorce rate in recent years that's an accusation that could be levelled at millions of people, quite possibly including some paid up members of Mensa. But aside from that does this sound to anyone else like a load of hysterical bollocks on the part of the social services mob? I mean how fucking bright to they think someone needs to be to get what marriage is about? For fuck's sake, children get a reasonable idea from fairy stories - when the last page of the book says that the princess and the prince "lived happily ever after" we don't sit down afterwards and explain things further. It's fucking crystal already. How daft do they think this young woman is? And how the fuck would they know in the first place?

Miss Robertson, of Dunfermline, Fife, has been in the care of her grandmother since she was nine months old after her parents were unable to look after her, with her welfare overseen by social workers at Fife council.

Sounds like the bastards think they know she's not bright enough as a direct result of the cradle-to-grave oversight of her entire fucking life. Is it just me or is that phrase 'from the cradle to the grave' sounding increasingly fucking sinister these days? She may have been looked after by her granny but it's pretty clear that the state considers itself a parent - The Parent in fact. It took her from her parents, rightly or wrongly, though I expect it never nurtured her, or praised her, or read stories, or kissed her goodnight, or put a plaster on a scraped knee and held her till the tears stopped, in other words never did a single fucking thing that normal parents do. lt gave itself in loco parentis power over her before she could even crawl and it's still fucking exercising it now. The state is Miss Robertson's mother and father (along with her Nanny and Big Brother too, though that applies to everyone) and has decided that she simply isn't up to it. Predictably enough there's little evidence beyond the usual spokesdrone and the whore phrase of "can't comment on individual cases", so it's not too clear exactly why it's thought she can't grasp the significance of getting married.

Yesterday, Miss Robertson, who is five months pregnant, said the decision was cruel.

Are they judging her on the pregnancy perhaps? Or the fact that she's pregnant by a man 8 years older than her? If so, so fucking what? She's hardly the first girl that age to get up the duff and her fiancé's age isn't exactly unprecedented either. Look, maybe she's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, I don't know and not working for Fife council I'm not about to judge one way or the other. But she understands the heartlessness of what's been done to her, her fiancé, their families and the big day they had all planned, because you'd really have to have reached stratospheric, if not government, levels of stupidity not to.

And that's not all.

She said: 'I am still so upset about everything. I know what marriage is. It is when two folks want to spend the rest of their lives together. I love Mark and I want to get married to him.'

"When two folks want to spend the rest of their lives together" - not quite how I'd put it but not far off either, and I'd be highly offended if someone whose fucking wages I help pay suggested to my face that it meant I had a room temperature IQ. How much can you add to two people wanting to spend the remainder of their lives with each other anyway? Possibly something about love and sharing and compromise, but I'd argue that when two individuals want to spend the rest of their lives together a certain amount of sharing and compromise is implied anyway, and there are enough gold diggers who weren't prevented from marrying a bank account by the timely intervention of the wise and angelic local authority angels that love looks less of a prerequisite for marriage and more of a bonus if it's there. And of course some would say that marriage is a good environment for raising children, which I personally feel is complete bollocks* but seems to be something else that Miss Robertson is able to grasp (my emphasis).

'But despite arguing with the social workers that we loved one another and didn't want our baby to be born to unmarried parents, they wouldn't budge.'

Well, I don't agree but that's just me personal opinion. If hers is that she wants her child's parents to be married, fair enough. But doesn't the fact that she's thinking of the child and its future suggest that she's given more thought to the whole marriage and family thing than the council poxcocks think she's capable of? Much more thought, I reckon.

The couple are concerned that their unborn baby, a boy they have already named Ben, could be taken away if Fife council judges Miss Robertson unable to care for him.

Oh, I wonder how the fuck they could possibly be worried about that. Remind me again... ah yes, of course. So she's fucking bright enough to fear that the same bastards who have pronounced her too thick to be a wife will, like their cuntish colleagues in Nottingham before them, say she's too stupid to be a mother as well. That doesn't sound like the thought processes of someone who needs to be watered twice a week by social services.

Looks to me like she's got just as good a grasp of what marriage means as anyone really, perhaps even a better grasp than some shallow bitch who ditches her poor starter husband when she gets bored with him***. Only time will tell, though not unless the council shitpots change their minds and allow the couple - and I'm still amazed and infuriated in equal measure at having to write 'allow' - to get married at all. And that raises another question - what's actually stopping them?

Under Scottish law, a registrar may refuse to marry a couple if he believes one or both the parties lack the mental capacity to understand what the institution of marriage is about.
In a highly unusual step, the registrar at Dunfermline Register Office refused to sanction the marriage after Fife council wrote a letter of objection.

So what happens if Miss Robertson's fiancé wrote a letter to the registrar at Dunfermline Register Office and CC'd to Fife council telling them to suck his balls because they're going to go and get married somewhere else? And if other Scottish registrars also refuse what happens if they're also told to join the ball sucking queue on the happy couple's return from England or anywhere that they're able to get married? If I was told that the fucking state refused to sanction my marriage I'd not only tell them to suck my balls but I'd inform them that they could chew on their own if they thought I was going to spend the rest of my life having my hard earned stolen before it even reached my fucking wallet just to fund the salaries of them and cunts like them, because I'd be leaving the country at the first fucking opportunity. Yeah, I did leave anyway, but you get the picture.

One final thought courtesy of Mrs Exile, who noted that the likely-to-remain-Miss Robertson will turn 18 at some point in the next year and speculated that perhaps she will then be told that she's not intelligent enough to vote either. I have to say that I think Mrs Exile is 100% wrong on that point - thick voters are highly prized by political parties of all colours and at all levels of government, and ideally they should be so stupid that they don't object to the kindly local party worker filling in the tricky forms for them and registering not only them but their underage children, dead relatives, pets and, where they have one, the fucking front lawn for postal ballots. This might be an area where Miss Robertson turns out to be not quite daft enough.

* As in sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, but I'm sure it's no better or worse than where a couple have simply decided to stay together without bothering to seek religious or state approval** and spunking away the best part of the cost of a new car.
** And who the cunting fuck are those tools to decide who can call themselves married and who can't? Why can't anyone who wants to describe themselves as married simply do so? It doesn't have to be a marriage that this or that religion would agree to recognise any more than I give extra weight to those who think their wedding was attended by a 13 billion year old invisible friend, much less the sanction of state busybodies. If you're religious and want to think that you personally must have the right ceremony in the right flavour house of worship before you can call yourself married that's just fine, but don't impose that on the rest of us who don't believe. Equally those who want state approval for whatever reasons should be able to pop along to a registry office or other venues, which is what millions, possibly billions, of us have done - some because it's more or less the only other option. But why can't a couple who, say for the sake of argument, are both secular and libertarian, simply throw a big party with all their friends during which they announce that from then on they'd like everyone there to consider them as spouse-ified as anyone just leaving church covered in confetti and running make up? Oh, and if any friends don't think that they're really married, not really really, please would they be kind of enough not to spoil it and fucking keep it to themselves if they want an invite to the next piss up. Would that be so hard? Would that cause the end of civilization? In a nutshell, why can't the only real prerequisite to a couple calling themselves married simply be a desire to be husband and wife? Or even wife and wife or husband and husband. Once government and religion are cut out and two adults can marry simply by deciding to be married there's no bar to gays anymore, though they'd have to accept that there'd be plenty of people who wouldn't recognise the validity of their marriage and of course two gay (insert almost any religion here) are still likely to have the problem of their sexuality conflicting with holy writ. To them I'd say take it up with the man upstairs, but don't let your lives pass you by while you're waiting for an answer.
*** Yes, it could as easily be a shallow bastard ditching his starter wife, but I'm comparing Miss Robertson so the hypothetical shallow person is a bitch.