Swedish politics

I know nothing about Swedish politics. I don't think I could even name a Swedish leader or political party. I would have guessed that Swedish politics were even less interesting than Canadian politics. I was wrong:

When it was founded six months ago, polls showed that a quarter of voters would consider supporting Feminist Initiative in elections next year because of rising domestic violence against women and higher salaries for men.

That goodwill seems to have faded after the party's recent founding congress, however, when radicals such as Tiina Rosenberg, a professor of gender studies, appeared to have secured control of the agenda. The resulting platform included proposals for abolishing marriage and changing the law to let people who undergo sex change operations legally alter their names.

The party called also for the creation of more "gender-neutral" names such as "Robin" or "Norva" that could apply to a boy or a girl. At present parents must choose names from an official list for boys or girls.

Abolishing marriage? Well, that'd certainly solve some of the debated issues over same-sex and plural marriage, wouldn't it? Allowing transsexuals to legally change their names? You mean that isn't currently legal? And the whole notion of legally restricting children's names to a list assembled by bureaucrats? Yikes!

It gets better, however:

Gudrun Schyman, another founding member of the party, [. . .] advocates what she calls a "man tax to cover the cost of violence against women in the home" but has stopped short of endorsing the opinions of Ireen von Wachenfeldt, who until recently ran one of Sweden's largest state shelters for battered women. In a recent television documentary called The Gender War, she proclaimed: "Men are animals."

The documentary noted that the shelter had printed excerpts of an extremist American feminist manifesto called Scum, which stands for the Society for Cutting Up Men. In it, women are urged to "destroy the male sex" and seize the chance made possible by science of giving birth only to females.

Hat tip to Baylen Linnekin at The Agitator.