The Dallas Star-Telegram (hat tip: Salon) has a snark-bait article about a school district getting flak from parents for considering an Arabic studies program:
Parents at Monday's meeting ranged from supportive to upset, said Willie Wimbrey, assistant principal at Cross Timbers.
"We had people who were animatedly fearful of anything to do with Islam," he said. "Others want their children exposed to everything. Others who say, We teach about Christmas, why not other religions? All cultures and major religions are taught throughout the state."
OK, yes, it's dumb to be afraid of teaching kids about another culture (especially when there's a shortage of Arabic speakers in our military and our intelligence agencies), but what jumped out at me what this quote from a parent:
"I don't think we should spend all our time on one culture," she said. "I think we should spread it around and be fair. I don't like it being stuffed down our throats."
"Stuffed" is a relatively rare variant of the "down our throats" family of expressions that seem to pop up whenever opponents of change find themselves at a loss for logical argument. Usually, something is shoved, forced, or crammed down our throats. But "stuffed" has a culinary connotation that I like. It makes me think of Julia Child forcing something into a tomato or a duck and being very French-by-way-of-Cambridge about it. I think people should start complaining about being "stuffed and trussed" whenever they feel threatened by change, particularly by anything involving gay rights.
Until recently, I was most accustomed to seeing "down our throat" in stories about land development, almost always by people who thought that their community had reached perfection with their arrival — and were stunned and betrayed to discover that local government thought it necessary to welcome other people.*
*Example using my preferred phrase from a WRAL story in 2003 about a neighborhood in famously liberal Chapel Hill, NC, getting in a snit about Jimmy Carter's favorite nonprofit: "We are objecting to Habitat [for Humanity] stuffing a high-density housing project down our throats — one which does not fit with the neighborhood," [Dr. Richard] Surwit said."
Now, of course, throat-cramming is all about the Obama adminstration forcing health care, low-fat foods, and high-speed rail down our gullets. The Huffington Post's Jason Linkens and Ben Craw (!) assembled a video of various politicians and journalists throwing around the phrase; sadly, but I didn't notice any "stuffed" in it.
I'm just waiting for a Tea Partier to extend the metaphor to its logical conclusion and say, "They are trying to shove ObamaCare [or whatever] down our throats, and, by God, we are going to vomit it right back up!"
Photo of ObamaCared turkey from Muffet. Creative Commons license.