Moral issues concern voters

For a certain predominantly Christian constituency, moral issues will heavily influence how they vote on September 17.

It was the day morality came down from the pulpit and marched on Parliament. August 23, 2004: Destiny Church's Enough is Enough protest attacked Wellington like a swarm of locusts sent to plague the sinners.

Massed in meticulously ordered ranks and clad in black, Brian Tamaki's followers looked to some like Nazis. To others - conservative Kiwis concerned society could not withstand the onslaught of legalised prostitution and civil unions - they looked like the guardians of everything pure and holy.

Nearly a year later and with an election looming, the concerns articulated by those 7500 Christian soldiers are still reverberating. For a certain predominantly Christian constituency, moral issues will heavily influence how they vote on September 17.

Civil unions and prostitution are the banner issues, but for concerned Christians choosing between the recently tarnished Christian Heritage, Destiny NZ, the quasi-Christian United Future or the secular main parties, morality means more than just sexual ethics.

While hardliners like Brian Tamaki have been the public face of the morals debate, similar issues are of concern to moderates, too. Today's Herald on Sunday-Digipoll survey shows 51 per cent of voters in Auckland, Northland and Hawke's Bay do not think the Government is taking the country in the right direction with its social changes.

The Herald on Sunday asked Glyn Carpenter of the Vision Network, a nationwide collective of mainly Protestant and Pentecostal church leaders, questions about moral issues:

Q. When voters say moral issues are important to them, what do they have in mind?

A. The average person asked to respond to moral issues might just think in terms of things like prostitution and civil unions. But we would want morality to be taken much more broadly. Moral issues come down to the choices we make and our understanding of right and wrong. Consumerism, human rights, general integrity - these are all moral issues.

Q. A writer of a letter to the editor accused the Government recently of failing on moral issues by "pandering to minority groupings of social and sexual deviants". Is that a widespread feeling?

A. It would be totally fair to say Parliament has passed some very controversial legislation ... And it would be fair to say that a great many people are concerned. There's a well-known quote that comes out of Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky's book The Brothers Karamazov: without God everything is possible, everything is permissible. As a Christian organisation, what we would say is that in a society which has really lost sight of God, we're in that situation that Dostoevsky described, which is that everything is permissible. The question that we would want to throw back to people is: how do you know what is right and wrong? Where do you draw the line on any issue? Suppose Parliament were to debate incest ... If it's simply whatever the public feels like or whatever the majority thinks, where do we go then?

Q. Helen Clark is agnostic and Don Brash doesn't believe in God. Is that relevant?

A. It is relevant. If we're talking about questions of morality, the standard Christian view would be that our concept of right and wrong flows out of our concept of God.

Q. What do people mean when they talk about the family being under attack?

A. What we have is a society that is becoming increasingly self-focussed and increasingly individualistic. People are growing up with a lot more focus on their own rights than they are on their responsibilities ... That's why we have such large numbers of children being born out of wedlock. Marriage is the commitment of a man and a woman to each other to provide the basis of the unit which will raise children. And while it's not perfect, it's not ideal, and there are many situations where it doesn't work out as we would hope, the fact is that clearly, demonstrably, it provides the most stable and nurturing environment for children to be raised in. [But] when we have films and Hollywood movies which promote promiscuous sex and out-of-marriage sex, and when we have a Government basically saying it doesn't matter what form a family takes - these are sending out the wrong signals to people.

Q. What impact has the fall from grace of Graham Capill had on the credibility of morals campaigners?

A. It's been a very cogent reminder that we don't express these views from a position that one group is perfect and another group isn't. Whatever group we're in we all struggle with issues in life.

- Herald on Sunday