Te Radar: Bigots who have put the mental into fundamental

HUMOUR

I am sure that many a church fair was organised under the twitching and urine-streaked feet of a strung-up Negro.

It's one of the reasons that I simply cannot take seriously those who espouse religious edicts as moral truths.

Over the years, though, despite the protestations of many goodly, God-fearing folk, certain policies of social engineering have deemed the lynching of coloured folk socially unacceptable.

Other examples of social engineering have allowed women to vote and decriminalised the sexual proclivities of consenting adults.

Nonetheless we still live in a country where convicted and imprisoned murderers can get married, but two law-abiding queers can't.

This situation is nearly as absurd as some of the petty-minded bigotry that is emanating from our supposed peers.

United Future MP Paul Adams stated that "there is not one homosexual man or lesbian woman in this country that is discriminated against, and can't get married. They can. They have just got to choose a partner of the opposite sex".

Nor did it come as a surprise that Bishop Whakahuihui Vercoe, a man who is now the top Anglican Church leader, has the audacity to declare a vision for a world without gays.

These pages have been inundated with the superstitious claptrap of those associated with organisations such as the Maxim Institute. These self-proclaimed moral guardians are the people who put the mental into fundamentalism.

Even their mission statement reeks of the hypocrisy of their ilk, claiming as they do, without any hint of irony, a desire to "promote the principles of a free, just and compassionate society".

I am sure that those who use religion to justify stoning rape victims to death as adulteresses feel they are doing the same thing.

It is clear that the present debate over civil unions is not as civil as it should be.

The scripture-shakers continue to flail their hands and gnash their teeth every time some kind of common sense and justice is brought to social issues.

As far as their arguments are concerned, nothing succeeds like their cynical exploitation of the kiddies.

Their bourgeois eurocentric notion of the happy nuclear family has to be one of the greatest myths perpetrated on society since we were told that an entity cobbled together the world in six days, before taking time off for a lie-down.

And so the zealots are wailing that allowing gays to commit themselves in a socially and legally recognised partnership is only the first step for those who wish to foist on society their so-called "alternative lifestyles".

This is true. I for one have been a passionate advocate for the joys brought by polygamy for some time.

As much as I love women I find they are a lot like sheep. As delightful and individualistic as they are, they seem to function better in a flock.

I guess for many that statement will confirm that muddle-headed thinking isn't confined to the religious.

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