WHY THE AFFABLE MAN, JOHN KEY, STAYS TOP OF THE POPS (Letter to Dompost, December 15)

In connection with the appalling revelations of CIA torture, Jane Bowron (Street sinning, karma and why the US can't handle the truth, December 15) admits we’ve become ‘so used to letting the bad go by and no one owning it or saying it even exists’.

 

Yes. Think outrageous pay packets for public servants, think video beheadings, think dirty dairying, hungry children, axe murderers. Think old people in retirement homes, put away beyond the pale of ordinary society. 

This is why the affable man, John Key, stays top of the pops. While he’s still up there spinning and grinning, New Zealand can pretend everything in the garden’s rosy. We can moralise about the US and its barbaric torture practices but at least they’ve at last admitted it. Our self-delusion will come to an end only when we admit our own barbaric torture. Think abortion.

TORTURE OF ABORTION IS A MORAL ABOMINATION TOO (Letter to the Dom Post, December 11)

‘Torture’, you thunder in your editorial, (Torture report damning for US, December 11) ‘is a moral abomination.’ It’s easy enough to pontificate when you know your readers will agree with you.

Surely sucking a sentient human being limb by limb up a cannula is torture, but because one in three women in this country have by now inflicted this brutal procedure on their own unborn children, the media euphemizes it as ‘the right to choose’.

PUBLISHING LETTERS AGAINST ABORTION REQUIRES FEARLESSNESS (Letter to Dom Post, November 29)

Tom Scott makes me laugh. That’s his job but when he says ‘Newspapers should still be fearless’, I suspect the joke escapes him.

 

My letters to The Dominion Post about abortion are never published. My opinions on other topics are occasionally, but nothing mentioning the ‘a’ word. Thousands of New Zealanders object to our abortion law and it’s misinterpretation and many write letters, but only rarely do even the most innocuous make it into print.  What reason is there for their suppression, but fear?

 

Publishing letters against abortion requires not just professionalism but courage of editorial staff who’ve had abortions or love someone who has. Readers suffering PTSD following abortions would naturally react negatively. So would medical staff who do abortions. Same with school nurses who take teenagers for abortions and lie to their mothers. Pan the camera wider to include the pharmaceuticals and clinic operators who make billions worldwide from the trade. Add in the overwhelming evidence of links between abortion and breast cancer, for instance, which we never read about in The Dominion Post.

 

 

Tom Scott says ‘people need to know stuff’. Too right. What does it take for a newspaper to publish information or letters opposing abortion? Fearlessness.

KILLING BABIES IS OKAY BUT BODY HUGS ARE A NO-NO (Letter to Dom Post, November 28)

The Roger Sutton debacle, says Women’s Minister Louise Sutton, is ‘a win for women’. Really? Who does she think she’s kidding? Not herself - her face on the front page gives the game away. No woman  can really believe that killing babies in the womb is okay but body hugs are a no-no. Society has not ‘evolved’, it’s terminally bewildered and devolving downhill faster and faster.  

That being the case, there’s probably no point in reminding women in the workplace of the Christian principle that any grievance should first be taken privately to the putative offender. Roger Sutton’s obviously a decent man. If the complainant had followed that advice the whole brouhaha would have been avoided - and certain egos unenhanced.

 

THE COLUMN YOU NEARLY DIDN'T GET TO SEE (First published in 'NZ Catholic, November 27)

NZ Catholic editor Peter Grace was asked to withdraw this column from publication. To his everlasting credit, he declined. It appears in today's edition, with a few minor changes, under the title To love as Jesus loves.

        
          We Catholics must all know about ‘the triumph of evil’, how it requires only ‘the silence of good men’. Reputedly posited by the 18^th century Irish statesman Edmund Burke, this idea has served speechmakers well ever since. The last time I heard it trotted out (very appropriately) was just last month, at the Voice for Life Conference in Wellington.

However, Joy Cowley’s views on ‘gayness’ (NZ Catholic, October 5) suggest that for  a 21^st century audience Burke needs an update. Because it seems evil, in a guise he probably never imagined, triumphs now not only by the silence of good men but also by the speech of well-meaning women.

Here’s another quote, this one from Scripture – which I naively thought Mass-going Catholics take as an unimpeachable source. ‘Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for each other, men doing shameful things with men and receiving in themselves due reward for their perversion’ (Rom 1, 27).

But Joy Cowley says St Paul could be wrong. Incorrect. Politically speaking yes, he certainly is, and her popularity as a writer helps to explain her stance. But to suggest any perversion of the truth – stated in the word of God, for heaven’s sake - by the greatest of mystics, apostle and martyr, third in the canon of saints, is preposterous.

Joy then pulls out the old thorn in the flesh theory - St Paul might have been gay. That’s possibly fact, but what’s undeniably fact is, he was celibate.

Pope Francis, in his ineffable way, has warned us of ‘buonismo, a destructive tendency … that in the name of a deceptive mercy  binds wounds without first curing and treating them … It is the temptation of the do-gooders.’ And St Paul says ‘Let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and of spirit, making holiness perfect in the fear of God’ (2 Cor 7,1).

 But Joy quotes St John: ‘In love there can be no fear, but fear is driven out by perfect love’ (1 Jn 4, 18). Well, for anyone who isn’t yet perfect in love – and that’s the overwhelming majority,  including me - fear of gay marriage is just common sense: evil is frightening because it’s harmful. 

She asserts that ‘a deep commitment of love’ in homosexual relationships equates with marriage. ‘It’s all about love,’ she says. The trouble with that is, St John’s idea of love is  very different from Joy’s. True Christian love isn’t about feeling, it’s about acting. ‘He who does the will of my Father, he shall enter the kingdom of Heaven’ (Mt 7,21).

Loving means doing God’s will, in other words fulfilling his plan for our perfection by caring for others as much as we care for ourselves, and the best we can hope for ourselves and others is to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Clearly, we need to love as Jesus loves. With the heart of Christ.

 

 

 

 

JUDITH'S EXPECTATIONS OF HONOURABLENESS (Letter to Dom Post, November 26

Judging by Judith Collins’ expression (John Key: No dirt has stuck to my office, November 26), her expectations of Honourableness have got her right over feeling ‘incredibly let down’ by her chum Cameron Slater.

But to avoid similar grief in future she should keep in mind the adage, ‘By their friends you shall know them’.

UN POPULATION FUND MAKES A HIGHFALUTIN PROPOSAL (Letter to Dom Post, November 21)

Quite possibly, a ‘weak United Nations flounders as dictators continue to flourish’ (November 21) because its bureaucracy’s preoccupations include such peace-making imperatives as delivering a ‘demographic dividend’ to a world that’s younger now than ever before.  

Such a highfalutin proposal suggests a similarly absurd means to the end, and it’s this: the UN Population Fund recommends making abortions freely available to adolescents, removing all age of consent, prostitution and drug laws, and reducing parents’ involvement in their children’s sex education.  

With such pressing business on the table, it looks like the under-employed members of the UN war crimes tribunals have been given more important work to do.