Barend Vlaardingerbroek: The right of independent business operators to do business with whom they will

Bakeries are the new civil rights battlegrounds, and not just in the United States - New York Times 18-12-16

The passage of same-sex marriage (SSM) into law has opened up a Pandora’s Box of competing rights.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: What the Aussie postal ballot tells us about the future of democracy

You’ve got to hand it to the Aussies for originality. There’s a divisive social issue the Government would rather not have to deal with (same-sex marriage – SSM), so let’s have a postal ‘survey’ to gauge public opinion and then we might put the issue to a vote in parliament or we might not, depending on the outcome. Real cutting-edge leadership, Mal.

Just in case anyone is in any doubt, this was neither a referendum nor a plebiscite, either of which would have been conducted under the auspices of the Australian Electoral Commission. Instead, this show was run by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and participation wasn’t compulsory as it would be under Australian electoral law.

Mike Butler: Same-sex marriage two years on

The demand for same-sex marriages by New Zealand residents has decreased by over 10 percent over the past year while traditional marriage has slightly increased in the same time period, according to statistics released this week.

Civil Unions and Marriages: September 2015 quarter shows that there were 19,659 traditional marriages, up from 19,266, while there were 450 same-sex marriages, down from 504. (1)

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: In defence of Russia's stance

The outcome of the Irish referendum on same-sex marriage (SSM) came as no surprise. No clairvoyance was required – just the realisation that the best allies the SSM ‘Yes’ campaigners had were the ‘No’ camp. As usual.

Every time this issue comes up in Western society, it’s the same story: the musty old authoritarian order of yesteryear coming up against the fresh new egalitarian avant-garde – or so both sides appear to be intent on making it seem.  Throw in a slick ‘Yes’ campaign capitalising on most people’s naïve misunderstandings concerning ‘discrimination’ and ‘equality’ and there’s only one possible winner. And that’s coming from a stalwart defender of male-female exclusivity in marriage – me!

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: A brave new world of pluri-potent females and redundant males

There was an exciting scientific discovery very recently: mature cells, when immersed in a dilute citric acid solution for half an hour, regress to the state of stem cells which can subsequently be cajoled into turning into specialised cells, such as a nerve cell or a liver cell. These ‘induced pluri-potent stem cells’ (iPSCs, or just iPCs) are not new in themselves, having been around for a few years, but we used to have to make them by manipulating their genetic make-up.

There’s no huge surprises here really. All cells in your body contain the same DNA, so all carry the genetic information needed to become any of the specialised cells. When you’re still a tiny ball of cells 10 days after fertilisation, you’re made of stem cells that are all alike but that start to differentiate into the various specialised types of cells a bit later.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Marriage – What’s Love Got To Do With It?

What’s love got to do, got to do with it?

What’s love but a second-hand emotion?

... What’s love but a sweet old-fashioned notion? – Tina Turner 1993

In the aftermath of the Australian High Court ruling last week that same-sex marriage (SSM) law enacted by the ACT was invalid, all the usual arguments for and against SSM were trotted out by the opposing camps, and as usual were given plenty of airing by the media. Not that anything new was said as far as I could tell, but it gave us all the opportunity to reflect on the issue and our own positions on it. In the course of these musings, two things struck me.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Same-sex marriage – a looming quandary

When Marriage Acts are amended to bring same-sex couples within their ambit, those couples become subject to the existing restrictions imposed by blood and family ties (consanguinity and affinity) which forbid people from marrying someone too ‘close’ to them. So if a woman can’t marry her brother, uncle or nephew, she can’t marry her sister, aunt or niece either. Simple, right? As far as it goes, yes. But not once we consider the rationale behind consanguinity restrictions and what the application of the ‘marriage equality’ paradigm to them is likely to lead to.

Admittedly, the effect of consanguinity on marriage custom is not quite as straightforward as I have implied above.

Mike Butler: Unpacking same-sex slogans

How many times have you heard or debated the slogan that same-sex parents are just as good at parenting as heterosexuals? Sociologist Walter Schumm of Kansas State University has applied his expertise in surveying attitudes and opinions to the deceptive simplicity of this question. He starts by looking at what the elements of this slogan could mean.

Karl du Fresne: Confessions of a dinosaur

My wife reckons that if I had been alive in 1893, I probably would have opposed women getting the vote. Ouch. That’s a bit harsh. I would, of course, prefer to think it’s not true – but how can I be sure? It’s unknowable. I have never thought of myself as sexist; quite the reverse. The people I most admire and respect have been strong women. I have never identified with the Kiwi bloke culture that thinks women should be kept in their place, whether it be the kitchen or the bedroom.

Mike Butler: The gay-marriage self-parody

The phrase “gay rights for nuclear-free whales” quite accurately parodies the shallow, trendy, bumper-sticker campaigns of the New Zealand left. Shallow trendiness dominated parliament this week as Labour MP Louisa Wall’s Marriage (Definition of Marriage Bill) Amendment Bill passed its third reading 77 votes to 44.

Mike Butler: Same-sex marriage in Canada

Canada’s 10 years of same-sex civil marriage has brought restrictions on free speech, restrictions on parental rights in education, and restrictions on religious institutions, according to Bradley Miller, who is an associate professor of law at the University of Western Ontario.

When same-sex relationships became the equivalent of traditional marriage, he wrote, a new orthodoxy was adopted. Therefore, “anyone who rejects the new orthodoxy must be acting on the basis of bigotry and animus toward gays and lesbians.”

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Same-sex marriage and my liberal/conservative identity crisis

I hate it when people ask me whether I’m a liberal or a conservative. I’ve tried inserting the word ‘classical’ before the ‘liberal’ in reply, but that appears to be too subtle a distinction for most. With the increasing Americanisation of the English language, ‘liberal’ has come to mean ‘politically correct’ to a lot of people, while ‘conservative’ has come to be associated with the religious far right. Oh dear, what am I to call myself, being neither?

The same-sex marriage debate has reinforced the polarity brought about by the new intellectual order, as 99% of the decibels seem to be generated by PC trendy-lefties on the one hand and stodgy old-world righties on the other. And they both spout off a lot of nonsense.

Karl du Fresne: What makes marriage unique

Few political issues in my lifetime have been more divisive than the Homosexual Law Reform Bill of 1986. It didn’t quite cause the violent convulsions that shook New Zealand during the 1981 Springbok tour, but the debate was almost as polarising.
To many people, legalising homosexual acts seemed a radical, dangerous step. Yet 26 years later, only a hard-core minority would still insist the country made a terrible mistake.

Even many of those who opposed the bill in 1986 now accept that it was wrong to treat someone as a criminal for being attracted to the same sex. The ability to form intimate relationships is essential for a complete life and it seems almost medieval that for so long, homosexual men (not lesbian women, oddly enough – the law didn’t recognise their existence) were denied this right.

Mike Butler: Same-sex parenting bad for kids

Is same-sex parenting bad for kids, and, if so, how? Sociologist Mark Regnerus posed the question: “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships?” for new Social Science Journal study. Regnerus screened 15,088 people in the United States to find 175 who had been raised for some of their childhood by a mother who was in a lesbian relationship, and 73 who had been raised for some of their childhood by a father in a gay relationship.

Regnerus found that only two of the 175 subjects who reported having a mother in a same-sex relationship spent their whole childhood with the couple, and no children studied spent their entire childhood with two homosexual males. Of that, 57 percent of children spent more than four months with lesbian parents, but only 23 percent spent more than three years.

Mike Butler: Tide turning for same-sex couples?

Fair Go presenter Alison Mau put her case for same-sex marriage, on TV ONE’s Close Up on Wednesday, by claiming that "there's a tide of feeling globally about this issue”. As a woman in a same-sex relationship wants to get married, Mau said “it's the fact that I could get married 15 years ago when I married for the first time...and suddenly I can't marry who I want to marry now. And that seems odd and silly and outdated."

Is there an actual tide of feeling, or is it that the tide of feeling involves a few luminaries (United States President Barack Obama, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, and now Mau) supporting same-sex marriage for political or other reasons?