John Roughan: Perverted messages from preachers of hate

COMMENT

Evil is one of those four-letter words, like hate, that I was brought up not to use about human beings. In the ordinary Christian outlook, evil is a judgment too heavy for mere mortals to make.

It is always a surprise to hear professed Christians Brian Tamaki and George W. Bush use the word so easily. It tells me that whatever their religion is it doesn't share the essence of the one I knew.

That, I think, is what makes Bush a truly chilling President for so many in the West, and to a vastly lesser degree, explains the unease Pastor Tamaki has aroused in this country with his march on Parliament last week.

Deep down, beneath the disagreements of politics, any society has to believe that it shares some bedrock characteristics, and it seems to me that those come in almost all societies from the predominant religion.

You don't have to be a practising Christian in a country such as New Zealand to be inculcated with the essence of Christianity's outlook on human goodness.

It means we hesitate to damn anybody completely, not if we want to be taken seriously. We have, without thinking about it, without perhaps knowing it, a sense of the divine in every human being no matter what.

It is probably that bedrock respect which gave rise gradually to the liberalism of the countries of western Christianity.

It permitted allegiance to egalitarian law over family and tribe, and permitted strangers to trust each other, which is the source of laws of contract, property and commerce.

Those laws allowed capitalism to develop in Christian countries, and capitalism brought wider education which in turn generated demands for ever more democracy, civil rights and social welfare.

The extension of legal recognition and rights to homosexual couples, much feared by Pastor Tamaki and opposed outright by the United States Republican convention this week, is a perfectly logical step in a Christian tradition.

If that tradition defies the will of their God then so, presumably, do the capitalism and prosperity that neither the pastor nor the President appears to mind.

But they are not wholly wrong either. Put aside Mr Tamaki's pathological theory of homosexuality ("God doesn't give you the wrong gender") and he is right, I think, in saying that the Civil Union Bill will undermine the status of marriage.

The legislation is timid and rather dishonest. In an attempt to appease conservative sentiment, it pretends to create a distinction between civil unions, which anyone may have, and marriage, which by law can bind only a man and a woman. But both contracts will carry the same legal rights and obligation, and both will be performed as civil or religious ceremonies. To all intents and purposes there will be no distinction.

That would not matter if both were equally enforced by political correctness. But they will not be.

The media will have to make a decision if the bill is passed. Do they thenceforth make it a practice that whenever a heterosexual couple appears in a story, it must specify whether the couple was married or "civilly united"? A fussy editor might issue that edict but is it practical?

It would be better for all concerned - certainly for homosexual couples - if we simply refused to go along with the fictional legal distinction and referred to all legally joined couples as "married". But I fear that won't happen either.

We will be sensitive to the fact that some people - the Prime Minister, for one - feel quite strongly that a civil union is preferable to a marriage, and so we will be wary of describing anyone as "married".

In a surprisingly short time the term will quite likely become rare in the media and, more gradually, in popular use.

If you doubt this, you haven't noticed how quickly the terms husband and wife have given way to "partner". When a person's preference is unknown, "partner" is now the safer default setting.

Each time the terminology of marriage gives way to some neutered neologism, life loses a little more of its romance.

And it need never happen in this case if the Government had simply the courage to grant homosexual couples their wish. They want their commitments recognised by the Marriage Act, nothing less, and there is no reason I can see to deny them.

It seems ironic that the Government's compromise with religious conservatism has created a greater threat to the status of marriage than a straightforward inclusion of homosexuals in the Marriage Act would have done. In fact, the homosexual clamour to be included has been the first fillip that unfashionable institution has received in a long time.

Pastor Tamaki and his strange Destiny Church are never going to be a significant force in this country. The United States President is a different story. When he describes America's enemies as "evil" and "haters", he sends a shudder to my soul.

A previous President, Ronald Reagan, once famously used that e-word about the Soviet Union. But when Bush uses it, you can tell he believes it. And you wonder whether around his cabinet table there are minds any more sophisticated.

Suppose those who meet in the White House to chart the progress of this war on terror really do understand the enemy only as evil haters. How confident does that make you? How safe does it leave us?

The Republican Party was at pains to keep the pentecostalism quiet at this week's convention but the President cannot help himself. He is a true believer in this perverted strain of Christianity that lacks the essential love, and consequently the human insights, of the real thing.

Nearly three years after the collapse of the Twin Towers, he seems still to not know his enemies, or want to know them. He is wilfully, dangerously ignorant, the first such American President I have seen. This is no ordinary US election. It is vitally important for the world that Americans remove this President.

* John Roughan is a Herald assistant editor.