THE GREENS AREN'T THE ONLY ONES (Letter printed in Dom Post, March 28)

Hideous though the subject is, I had to laugh at Kevin Hague’s comment on a euthanasia policy (Euthanasia issue too ‘risky’ for politicians, March 23). The Greens, he says, ‘haven’t worked out how to create a regime that doesn’t have the risk of being abused.’ 

That’s because it can’t be done.

BISHOP DRENNAN AND THE 'HOLLAND OF OCEANIA' - Letter to NZ Catholic, March 23

So Bishop Drennan has gone ‘out to the peripheries’, joining 500 protestors in a city square. So far, so good.  

But our bishops’ first task is to preach the Gospel, to ‘bring out the great value ... of a human being, his physical life’ (Vatican II). The protest God awaits is surely not one against a perceived ‘assault on our rights as citizens’ but the actual, prolonged assault on the right to life itself, its dreadful toll of nearly 500,000 unborn citizens killed by abortion, on the rights of their mothers to proper informed consent, of parents to be informed of teenage daughters’ pregnancies.

 

It seems unlikely that Bishop Drennan could muster 500 of his flock in the cathedral to pray for the rights of the unborn. This dismal reality reflects the priority accorded doctrine, prayer and sin in our dioceses, a desacralization which has earned a new title for New Zealand - the ‘Holland of Oceania’. 

It’s not soap boxes and speeches the unborn cry out for, it’s prayer and fasting; it’s not the TPPA we should protest about. There can be no justice as long as we tolerate, and by our silence condone, this latter-day slaughter of the innocents.

DON'T LOOK NOW TOM BUT YOUR CONSCIENCE IS SHOWING (Letter to the Dom Post, March 12)

Tom Scott has a way of hitting the bull’s eye without even trying.  

In The world according to 1080 Nazis (March 12) he depicts as ‘fair game’ something which looks remarkably like a baby in the womb. Scott may not know that since 1974 nearly 500,000 babies have been aborted in New Zealand, but he certainly knows that unborn babies are legally ‘fair game’. 

Don’t look now Tom, but your conscience is showing.

MUSLIMS TAKE GOD SERIOUSLY (Letter to the Dom Post, March 10)

Garry Wills rightly inveighs against ‘a holy war’ against Muslims (Peace, the Pope’s biggest mission, March 10). Any and all war is unholy: New Zealand’s response to Iraq’s appeal for help against ISIS must be by way of humanitarian aid. Training troops is simply making war at one remove.  

As Wills suggests, Pope Francis may well ‘unite believers in the One God’. Francis will certainly be aware that the root cause for the rise of Islam in the West and especially its appeal to the young is that Muslims take God seriously. Nominally Christian Baby Boomers have in practice forgotten God and consequently Gen Z and its offspring are looking elsewhere for the Supreme Being they instinctively know exists.  

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does the human spirit.

WHY WOULD CHANDOR RATHOD WANT TO BE BACK IN WAIPUKURAU? (Letter printed in Central Hawke's Bay Mail, March 10)

This letter to CHB Mail was prompted by Mayor Peter Butler's comment on Chandor Rathod, who in 2004 was found not guilty on reasons of insanity of murdering his wife.

In an interview with CHB Mail former CHB district councillor Hilary Pedersen, who had befriended Rathod, described him as 'a gentle man' whose violence towards his wife was 'completely out of character'.

Rathod has left New Zealand  to return to India for a funeral, prompting Mayor Butler to remark that 'we don't need types like him living in Central Hawke's Bay. We don't want him back in Waipukurau.'

 

Is it likely Rathod would want to be back in Waipukurau?

 

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR, CHB MAIL, MARCH 10:

I’ve never in my life had such generous, charming service from a retailer than from Chandor Rathod in the Racecourse Rd Dairy, Waipukurau.

Wanting spices for a curry, I remembered someone saying they’d smelt wonderful aromas coming from the Sunset Dairy’s kitchen. I asked Chandor, at the counter, where I could buy what I needed.

He disappeared and returned with his smiling wife, smiling grandmother and children and all the spices I wanted, individually wrapped and named, and refused any payment.

If our community had accorded him more of the respect he’d enjoyed as a banker in his home country, had considered how he must have felt, serving icecreams while his wife earned a decent income as a veterinarian, and had extended to the family the compassion and friendship shown them by Hilary Pedersen, that heartbreaking tragedy and sad blot on our Central Hawke’s Bay escutcheon might have been avoided.