LIES TOLD BY POLICE WILL NEVER JUSTIFY A CONVICTION (Letter to Dom Post, July 22)

Lies told by the police (Police lied to catch baby killer, (July 22) to obtain a conviction, lies upheld by the Supreme Court, undermine and potentially make a travesty of the entire edifice of New Zealand’s justice system.

Note that Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias dissented from the Supreme Court’s approval of this shabby business, perhaps because her presumably Jewish heritage has written the Decalogue and its Eighth Commandment - ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour’ - into her very bones. 

Why did the police go to such lengths to trap a mere boy (at the time of his offence), floundering out of his moral depth after finding himself father to premature twins at age seventeen? Was it a knee-jerk response to the outpouring of anger over child abuse in this country?

If so, their machinations have served simply to aggravate our difficulties. We must remember that the ends never justify the means.

NATIONAL'S "ARDENT PRACTISING CATHOLICS" AND IT'S EUTHANASIA POLICY(Letter to Dompost, July 19)

A moment’s quiet reflection (which “ardent, practising Catholics” find easy, because they do it regularly) would tell John McLean (July 18) that the argument against euthanasia, like that against abortion, hasn’t necessarily anything to do with religion, but a lot to do with common sense.

 

A little more reflection would reveal that Catholics are also doctrinally opposed to abortion - which was introduced in New Zealand under a National Government. So much for McLean’s “simple lesson”on National Party policy making.

Not simple so much as simplistic. In the extreme.

PAYING FOR OUR CONTEMPT (Letter to Dompost, July 15)

Navina Clemerson (Letters, July 14) is right to condemn the jailing of a mother of small children. She’s right to point to money being more important than children, that in New Zealand children are of no account, and that when they grow up we may have to pay for our contempt.

 

Only we won’t have to wait. We’re paying right now. The evidence is everywhere – for instance, this mother’s offending - that our society has already lost respect. And that’s because we have no care or compassion for the smallest children, those yet to be born.

 

Children’s welfare will ‘truly come first’ only when we show care and compassion for all children, not just the ones we can see.

HOW MANY TRUFFULA TREES? (Letter printed in The Dominion Post, July 11)

Isn't it interesting? The letters I fire off so frequently to the Dompost on the subject of abortion never see the light of day.

But behold, I write one about a billionaire's yacht and the homeless (see below) and bingo! It's in. Why? It's politically correct.


Thank God we still live in a democracy with a free press. Because the day may come when the needs of the homeless, jobless and hopeless are seen to outweigh the indulgences of the overpaid, overfed and overprivileged. And with the luxuries of the latter, like Graham Hart’s (Hart floats superyacht sale for $266m, July 11), flaunted in the face of the former, we should only have to wait for polling day to see some kind of justice done.

It adds irony to injury that having made his billions in packaging Hart might fairly be described, in the terms of Dr Seuss, as the ‘Onceler’. 

Since The Lorax was written in 1971, how many truffula trees has he cut down?

MORE CHANCE OF HARM FROM AN ABORTION THAN FROM PARENTS (Letter to Dom Post, July 8)

Taranaki mother Hillary Keift braved Parliament to tell how she found her teenage daughter hanging from the rafters in the car shed after a covert abortion which resulted in infertility for life.

 

And the select committee were “sympathetic”. That’s nice. But they say if girls have to tell their parents they’re pregnant they might be harmed. Really? Did they actually compare the statistical possibility of such a sinister scenario (incestuous, violent father/brother + absent or brutish mother) with the likelihood of a botched abortion? More chance of harm from an abortion surely, than from parents.

 

There are about 280 under-sixteen abortions a year - five times more than the committee stated. And Family Planning’s Jackie Edmond has said that 25 % don’t tell their parents. So in the last ten years about 700 girls have secretly had an abortion. 

 

The committee thinks organisations like Family Planning – who are responsible for Hillary’s daughter’s infertility – can be trusted to ensure such a tragedy doesn’t recur. Family Planning is in the business of selling teenagers contraceptives so they can have safe sex, and then referring them for taxpayer-funded abortions when it turns out to be unsafe.

 

How trustworthy is that?

FAMILY PLANNING TOUTING FOR THE BUSINESS OF ABORTION (Letter to Dom Post July 5)

How naïve, to publish a plea from Jackie Edmond (Our abortion laws are broken, July 5) for ‘flexible’ abortion legislation. As if our legislation weren’t already as flexible as a yogi. 

Edmond is chief executive of the cutely titled Family Planning Association, who stated in the ‘40s that “once a life is created it should not be destroyed”. How times change.

Family Planning, now one of the top NZ referrers for abortion, runs an abortion clinic in Tauranga and will likely apply for licences to run more clinics throughout the country. Family Planning peddles contraceptives and nearly half the abortions done in 2012 resulted from contraceptive failure. 

Family Planning promotes ‘anything goes’ graphic sex education for teens and tweens and since its introduction in NZ schools, teen pregnancies and STIs have soared. Family Planning is in the business of sex, which naturally is good for the abortion trade, and Edmond is paid to run it.

She sounds like she’s touting for business.

WHY BISHOP DUNN'S "ELEPHANT" SEEMS LIKE A PET (Letter to 'NZ Catholic', July 5)

Msgr Brian Arahill’s concerns (NZ Catholic, June 26 - July 9) about aging priests being incapable of raising the Host above their heads provide an excellent illustration of the reasons for "Kiwi drift", as acknowledged recently by Bishop Patrick Dunn.

 

So does your headline, and the whole story. Cardinal Sarah didn’t "question" anything; he quoted our Pope Emeritus, who as Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that it’s essential during the Eucharistic Prayer to look together at the Lord. 

 

NZ Catholic is pandering to our Kiwi habit of questioning rubrics from "Rome". "We’re Kiwis," we say. "We do things differently here." The reason why Kiwi priests are aging and can’t raise the Host above their heads, and why aging lay Kiwis can’t kneel is, we’ve lost the fear of God which fears nothing but sin, and perfects us in love. At Pentecost my cathedral omitted it from the gifts of the Spirit. Without that filial fear which inspires humility and obedience, how can we hope to staunch the haemorrhage of native-born New Zealanders from the Body of Christ?

 

But to echo Cliff Corbett (Letters, June 26), accepting challenges like Cardinal Sarah’s to the way we do things here means clergy who led the 20th century charge to change would lose credibility.

 

Maybe that’s why they’ve only just noticed that gradual but great loss of Kiwi Catholics which Bishop Dunn describes as "the elephant in the room".

It’s been around so long, it seems like a pet.

COMPARING LETTERS TO THE DOM POST ON THE SUBJECT OF ABORTION

This is the what the Dominion Post does. It filters letters on the subject of abortion so that only the mildest objections make it into print.

Here's an example - a letter published today, July 4:

'I suppose it's true, Maggie Miller (July 1) that abortion is more humane for an unwanted child than 'years of misery ending in death by torture'.

This reasoning, though, is better suited to the euthanasia debate which involves the death of someone who chooses to die more 'humanely'.

Abortion is different because it involves no such consent and because it does involve a third option: life. I wish we would take that third option more seriously.

                                                                                                         Gavan O'Farrell

                                                                                                              Lower Hutt

And here's mine, which was not published today - and won't be tomorrow, either:

Maggie Miller (July 1) can’t understand why abortion is the precursor to child abuse. Of course parents should "take responsibility for the protection of children they bring into the world". But doesn’t that automatically imply they should also take responsibility for their protection before they bring them into the world?

Look at the stats. See when child abuse first became a problem - soon after we legislated to kill unborn children. The reason why abortion is the precursor of child abuse is, if it’s okay to kill a child before it’s born, it’s okay after.

But before birth we can’t see them. And for most of us apparently, that makes all the difference.


I'm not saying mine's the better letter. Just saying.