NEW ZEALAND ACQUIRES A BIG SISTER - First published in 'NZ Catholic' as GOVERNMENT POLICIES MUST NOT ADD TO ABUSE, September 22, 2013

 

NEW ZEALAND ACQUIRES A BIG SISTER

 

First published in NZ Catholic, September 22 2013 as

GOVERNMENT POLICIES MUST NOT ADD TO ABUSE

 

New Zealand seems to have acquired a Big Sister. In suggesting that, I’m not alluding to Paula Bennett’s size, merely noting a similarity of thought between the Minister for Social Development and the Orwellian character ‘Big Brother’, who ‘is watching you’.

With this sinister difference: while George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ is now universally recognised and loathed as a symbol of dystopian surveillance, Bennett’s plans for screening all government employees working with children, and possible instant dismissal for anyone even suspected of child abuse, are winning support.

Although the subject of legally killing up to 18,000 unborn children a year is proscribed by the media - who publish only the official statistics, because they have to - they feed on the abuse of born children as a kind of manna from hell. Gauging public sentiment by the headlines (and surely, genuinely dismayed themselves) politicians scent votes and jostle to get their snouts into the trough; the worst Labour’s Annette King could say was that the proposal had ‘fishhooks’.

But the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven is due to everyone. Ms Bennett will only aggravate the situation by denying that right to anyone working with children, or for that matter, to people frequenting parks and pools. How will she police this ridiculous measure, and who’ll pay for it? Taxpayers, who have better things to spend their money on.

You can’t stop child abuse with adult abuse; ‘charity’ that’s not based on justice is not charity. That’s why abortion, which denies our most basic right, is the root of cruelty to children, violence in the home and much more that’s evil in society. ‘The greatest destroyer of peace today,’ stated Blessed Teresa, ‘is abortion. If we can accept that a mother can kill her child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?’

The gangrene of legal abortion would only be worsened by this egregiously unjust and inadequate bandaid. As Pope Francis says, ‘violence begets violence’, therefore in New Zealand, children are battered to death, usually by that modern phenomenon, the cruel stepfather; in Syria, children are poisoned to death by a cruel tyrant.

My mother, who once stood on a chair - because she said, ‘they were all such big women’ - to berate feminists clamouring for abortion at the United Women’s Convention in the ‘70s would never accept that justice and the law are not synonymous. But if she were alive today, following the gay marriage legislation and anticipating this threat to freedom, I’m afraid she’d have to.

So what exactly is justice? Jesus’ statement, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’ (Mt 22,21), inspires this definition from St Thomas Aquinas: ‘Justice is the perpetual, constant will to give to everyone what is due to him.

Giving implies self-denial; self-denial connotes prayer. To return to Blessed Teresa: ‘If we pray, we will believe; if we believe, we will love; if we love, we will serve.’

Behold, justice. 

 NZ