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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer John Black.
NZ Herald on a Crusade against Christians
Why does the NZ Herald hate Christians?
Our country’s premier ex-newspaper, the New Zealand Herald has decided to start a crusade against Christians.
I say ‘ex-newspaper’ as it now seems to have completed the transition from the respectable, if starchy, ‘Granny Herald’ that I grew up with, to something resembling a cross between a celebrity gossip mag and Pravda, the former state newspaper of the Soviet Union. Three times last week both the print version and its online mutation carried hit pieces on a Christian high school in Tauranga, Bethlehem College. The first had a several-hundred word moan about the school’s statement of belief, signed voluntarily by parents when they enrol their children. The point of contention in the statement concerns marriage:
“Marriage is an institution created by God in which one man and one woman enter into an exclusive relationship intended for life.”
Until five minutes ago, this was an aspiration held widely throughout our society (although I personally quibble with the “created by God” business; at times my own marriage seemed to be created by His opposite number). Of course, it was the “one man and one woman” clause that provoked an eruption of righteous indignation from the usual easily offended offenders. A ‘pride advocate’ Mr Gordy Lockhart correctly labelled it ‘discriminatory’ and just as correctly located our present year as 2022, claiming for no good reason that the passing of time made such a belief ‘totally inappropriate’.
Again, a belief that marriage should be reserved for ‘one man and one woman’ is a Christian belief common throughout New Zealand – despite changes in marriage law. For myself, I have always believed that conservative Christians missed a trick with gay marriage. If they find homosexual sex immoral the best way of reducing the incidence of it in the world is to make gays marry each other – this is based on personal experience of the libido-cooling effects of the married state.
Regardless, just why Mr Lockhart or the crusading New Zealand Herald is so concerned is perplexing. High school must have really changed since I went there if the first thing on teenage minds is the nature of marriage.
Motives were made clearer when the Herald ran its two other pieces. First came a report on a petition to ‘investigate abuse’ at the school sparked by the first report and organised by professional hysteric Shaneel Lal. But it was the third report that clarified what Bethlehem had really ‘trans’-gressed – the new and giddily triumphant ideology of gender. A ‘leaked document’ from the school stated:
The biological sex of a person is determined at conception to be male or female and their gender identity should align with their biological sex, and the long-term health consequences of introducing hormones of the opposite biological sex into a child’s developing body are largely unknown.
Well, yes and YES.
Such truth-telling in the current climate is a no-no. Mr Lockhart excelled himself this time calling it ‘appalling’ and ‘dripping with transphobia’. Apparently, to have reservations about the wisdom of carving up the bodies of confused young people – no, confused children – is transphobic. That makes me, and I imagine many of my readers, big fat transphobes.
Bethlehem College and others openly defying this sickening practice are to my mind heroic. And time will vindicate their opposition. Already the tide may be turning with well-known psychologist, Jordan Peterson, writing in the Telegraph last week, likening trans surgery on teenagers to child sacrifice and suggesting those responsible should be imprisoned. There was also the recent release of American conservative Matt Walsh’s documentary What is a Woman? where he asks this question to a range of gender ‘experts’ and gets nothing but nonsense in response. Here in New Zealand, Family First commissioned a Curia poll that found only 15% of us have swallowed the trans ideology line that children should be taught gender is a ‘choice’.
But this resistance is still limited to conservative voices. Moreover, they are, with the possible exception of Peterson, Christian voices. And so we come to the real reason for the Herald’s targeting of Christians.
Why for example don’t the woke millennial reporters who penned these pieces have a similar look at the policies of, say, the Muslim school, Zayed College for Girls in Mangere? What is their position on gay, let alone trans students, if, as their website boasts, ‘The Noble Qur’an is the authoritative source’ for their curriculum? Doesn’t the safety of Muslim trans and gay kids matter?
This is because it is not really about the ‘safety’ or equality of young gay or trans people at all; it’s about undermining the only established belief that stands a chance of preventing the total victory of moral relativism in our society: Christianity.
You don’t have to be a believing Christian to see which side is defending reality and which is acting like a superstitious cult brooking no opposition and condemning unbelievers to the hell of public ridicule.
You also don’t have to be a believer to have vast reservations about where the elite’s adoption of moral relativism – that holds subjective experience is everything – will lead us.
And the New Zealand Herald in leading this bullying attack on a private Christian school has decided to back the relativists. I honestly don’t know why any Christian reader would continue their Herald subscription.
Given it was so active in promoting ‘Pink Shirt Day’ last month, it is ironic the Herald, in their treatment of Christians, is perpetrating the kind of bullying they profess to despise.
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