Letters: Blatant lies about unfair trade

Your correspondent, G R Scown, should have done a little research before penning his latest missive, as he appears to have been taken in by President Trump's blatant lies about unfair trade.

Trump does not really believe in the free trade that he talks about while handing out US$20 billion a year in farm subsidies, most of which goes to large corporates such as the Rockefeller family, who are not farmers but own farms. A large slice goes to soybean farmers so that they can undercut South American soybean producers.

Canada does not levy a 270 per cent tariff on all dairy imports from USA. They have a quota system that allocates the amount to be imported from each supplying country. If a country exceeds its quota, then 273 per cent is levied on the oversupply but not on the allocated amount.

This arrangement complies with WTO rules.

Trump is either deliberately misrepresenting these facts or he is too busy playing golf to spend time verifying them.

STEPHEN PALMER
Bastia Hill

Gay in DNA

I must assume that John Haakma (letter, June 21) was responding to my letter on "gay parenting" of May 29 and not to my response to Rod Anderson's letter of June 8 in which I cited Mukherjee's The Gene (etc) as the source for my comment on "gayness" being genetically driven.

If indeed Haakma had read my second letter, his "disingenuousness" is in question, not mine, the word being defined as "dishonest, having secret motives, insincere".

Mukherjee cites J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology, as having demonstrated the concordance of "gayness" among identical twins at 52 per cent for both twins among 56 pairs. Of 54 pairs of non-identical twins, 22 per cent were both gay — still much higher than the 10 per cent estimated in the total population. In this 1980s research, Mukherjee wrote that Bailey had "profoundly changed the conversation around sexual identity from the 1960s rhetoric of 'choice' and 'personal preference' towards biology, genetics and inheritance."

Then, in 1991, Dean Hamer set about trying to locate the gene that should be identifiable for such results. By summer of 1992 he'd built family trees for nearly 1000 members of 114 gay men, producing a sibling concordance rate of 20 per cent — nearly twice the population rate.

Deeper analysis of the family trees demonstrated the genetic inheritance "sidestepping through generations — forwards and across like a knight's move in chess". "Hamer had suddenly moved from a phenotype (sexual preference) to a potential location on a chromosome — a genotype. He had not identified the "gay gene", but he had PROVED that a piece of DNA associated with sexual orientation could be physically mapped to the human genome." These extracts described by Mukherjee trace several years of research by Hamer.

This kind of material is what Mr Haakma's bundled commentary, unsourced, does not provide, and sounds to me dated and picked over to mesh with biblical absolutism. But the rock bottom of this whole discussion is that the horses have already bolted.

Government after government in modern nations and states have accepted the reality of gay people of both sexes in their democracies, often giving them the right to marry and parent children.

This has sometimes been accomplished by general referendum, as in recent cases in Australia and Ireland, and gives the lie to those who persist in claiming to represent "the majority".

RUSS HAY
Whanganui