Bruce Logan expertly articulates many of the inherent problems with the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill. He says the bill “is fraught with internal contradiction. It claims to be guarding the autonomy of homosexual and transgender people, but in doing so it actually denies the autonomy of other individuals and parents. The rights and freedoms affirmed by the Bill of Rights Act are ignored… The proposed legislation is a continuing attack on the foundation of Western civilisation’s philosophy of personhood; the rebellion of a generation that denies its material and spiritual history.”
Note – both NZ Herald and Stuff declined to publish this op-ed, despite continuing to publish numerous articles that clearly favour the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill. Aren’t the media supposed to report both sides of the debate, or do they simply choose to push one agenda only?
BRUCE LOGAN: Conversion therapy bill is fraught with internal contradiction
The primary aim and responsibility of scientific endeavour is to make precise observations, analysis and predictions about the world. When science is used to promote ideology for party reasons or government policy, laws become ambiguous and the consequences repressive.
The Labour Party’s “Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill” (CPPLB) is based on a muddle of selective anecdotes, misshapen compassion and doubtful science that would have us obey unreasonable law.
The CPLLB is a neo-Marxist bill insofar as it would divide people. Not according to economic or political status but according to sexual identity.
It is not possible to “uphold the human rights of all New Zealanders, including of rainbow New Zealanders, to live free from discrimination and harm,” and at the same time “affirm the dignity of all people” while claiming “that no sexual orientation or gender identity is broken and in need of fixing.”
The CPPLB is fraught with internal contradiction. It claims to be guarding the autonomy of homosexual and transgender people, but in doing so it actually denies the autonomy of other individuals and parents. The rights and freedoms affirmed by the Bill of Rights Act are ignored.
The CPPLB is cultivated by queer theory, transgender theory, engulfed by the cult of identity. It overlooks the strident battles between the biological essentialists of gay identity and the social constructionists of transgender theory. It is unaware of Stonewall’s 2015 (UK) contentious and influential resolution to reorder homosexual theory around gender identity only. Feeling is all.
It also disregards the fashionable and unstable social contagion of teenage transgenderism among teenage girls.
What is this “dignity” it would affirm?
For two millennia Western civilisation has been sustained by believing that everyone’s dignity comes from having been created, male and female, in God’s image. That unique foundation underpins the rule of law and democratic process. The moral imperative declaring the responsibility of the powerful to protect the weak owes its existence to that uniqueness.
A responsible and restrained freedom, English common law, on which our law depends, would not exist without the foundation of the Biblical story. There could be no “Tiriti o Waitangi”.
The CPPLB presumes that dignity derives from the self-identifying behaviour and not from God. Biological sex mutates into assigned gender. That is not just the rejection of the religious roots of Western civilisation, the transcendent authority of human dignity or the secular. It is legislating civil religion, a creed with a totalising agenda distorting science to serve its own ends.
There’s a fundamental problem. Self-affirming identity must seek support in tribal validation.
Democratic freedom is threatened. One identifies with the “we” of tribe rather than the “we” of nationhood.
Human rights compete with collective rights to protect each tribe’s legitimacy. Justice ceases to be about equality before the law. It becomes equality of outcome for each tribe. Individual freedom, dignity, private and public morality become what the state decides.
Having denied the Genesis narrative of meaning, the CPPLB must attempt something new. “Dignity” floats in the air. Believers in the old narrative are cast as criminals.
For example, Christians who believe that human beings have been created male and female or that homosexuality is one expression of human sinfulness become the enemy. With astonishing irony, Christians who still believe in a redeeming Creator God and foundation of dignity must have their legitimacy and right to speak in the public square determined by the State.
Parents who believe that male and female are a biological reality and would guide their children accordingly are, under the CPPLB, threatened by imprisonment.
Sexual orientation and gender identity trump what was once religious freedom. The pseudo-theology of the deified sexual and gendered self presents no cohesive narrative to sustain democracy.
The proposed legislation is a continuing attack on the foundation of Western civilisation’s philosophy of personhood; the rebellion of a generation that denies its material and spiritual history.
The Biblical story, that insists everyone has fallen into a state of disobedience requiring repentance and forgiveness, must be silenced. The CPPLB is a weapon in that arsenal.
The cancelling of Christians is necessary because the new religion has its own competing original sin; blaspheming the autonomous self. There is no forgiveness, only ridicule and banishment.
So we have a new kind of human being. A sacrosanct state validated, self-creating creature beyond criticism or satire. A counterfeit freedom overwhelms freedom.
Whose dignity is affirmed? Certainly not that of all New Zealanders.
Bruce Logan is a board member of Family First NZ
