Gordon Cheng / 11th July 2004
/ The ones they wouldn't publish!
On a comment about admissions by Mark Latham, leader of the Australian Federal Opposition, that he had an ‘active love life’ before and between his marriages:
Dear editor,
When Mark Latham says he had an “active love life” before he was married, does he actually mean he had an active sex life? If so, as a Christian I feel sorry for him. Firstly, because he has confused love with sex. Secondly, because in so doing, he's diminished his capacity to do both.
The man with the most active love life on the planet, Jesus Christ, never had sex. Believe it!
The Rev Gordon Cheng
Gordon Cheng / 8th July 2004
Alarming to see this report in a cyber-bulletin called Ecumenical News International for the month of July 2004:
Stockholm (ENI). A Swedish court has sentenced a pastor belonging to the Pentecostal movement in Sweden, Ake Green, to a month in prison, under a law against incitement, after he was found guilty of having offended homosexuals in a sermon. Soren Andersson, the president of the Swedish federation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights (RFSL), said on hearing the sentence that religious freedom could never be used as a reason to offend people. “Therefore,” he told journalists, “I cannot regard the sentence as an act of interference with freedom of religion.” During a sermon in 2003, Green described homosexuality as “abnormal, a horrible cancerous tumour in the body of society”.
Lutheranism was the state church in Sweden until quite recently. Now it seems that anyone who practices true Lutheranism too publicly is in danger of imprisonment.
Gordon Cheng / 7th July 2004
/ The ones they wouldn't publish!
Had a fascinating conversation with the letters editor of a leading Australian paper, who rang up and wanted to discuss editing and printing a letter I'd sent in. The original letter is as follows:
Dear editor,
Your recent insightful opinion piece (July 21) fails at its key point. That is to say, he has quite rightly pointed out how the secular media has completely misunderstood the “war on terror” by refusing to acknowledge that it is best viewed as a religious war. But the analysis fails to probe past this point to see that while the categories may be religious, the deeper issue is the corruption and hatred that is basic to human nature ...
This corruption is distressingly demonstrated by Islamists who decapitate their prisoners. It is also demonstrated by US army officers who demand blood and quote, of all things, the entry of Jesus to Jerusalem as a justification for their killing. Have they forgotten that Jesus won his victory over sin and evil not by killing but by being crucified, so that we might be forgiven? At least the Islamists are being true to their teaching; the Christians who kill on religious grounds are guilty of the most dreadful distortion. They are not fundamentalists but deviants.
Yours sincerely (etc)
He was quite happy with it, except for that one phrase “At least the Islamists are being true to their teaching”. He raised two objections, which were
- It was a broad brush statement;
- He felt uneasy about people making comments about groups they didn't belong to.
It reveals starkly the difficulty that the secularist mind has in comprehending a view which argues that one religion might be true and another false; all religions are not the same, and will express their beliefs in ways that are radically opposed.
As he was the editor, I could hardly complain about him doing his job and editing. He didn't have to phone at all. But afterwards I reflected that if the same principles he put for removing the offending sentence were applied to his newspaper, that publication would be some 60 pages of blank newspaper with a lot of paid advertising in between.
Ian Carmichael / 5th July 2004
The issue of protecting children from internet “nasties” presents significant challenges, not just technically, but legally.
In 1996, the U.S. Congress enacted a law designed to make it harder for children to access online pornography (the Child Online Protection Act).
This Act was the Congress' second attempt to address the problem. The first legislative attempt was the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which was deemed by the US Supreme Court to be too broad to pass the First Amendment principles of protecting the right of “free speech”, and so was effectively sunk. As one would expect, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was the initiator of the legal action which did the sinking (Reno v. ACLU).
Now it looks like there is every chance that the second attempt will also be sunk—again through legal action coordinated by the ACLU. The Supreme Court has basically said this week (by a close 5-4 decision) that there are real question marks over the new Act's constitutionality, and all but sent it back to a lower court to consider and strike down. (See Ashcroft v. ACLU.)
But is it really a legal problem, or is it a moral will problem?
In striking down the 1996 Act, the court laid out some very clear principles in relation to which material (particularly obscene material) will and won't be protected by the First Amendment. The legislators in Congress then took those principles and basically word-for-word built them into the 1998 Act.
In other words, the Court said if you want to pass this type of law, these are the legal hoops you have to jump through. The Congress said OK and duly jumped through those hoops, significantly limiting the scope of their law.
Well, it is looking like it is all to no avail. The Supreme Court has basically said, “No, we're still not going to let you do that, even though you jumped through our hoops—we'll find some other grounds for keeping the status quo”.
There is some extraordinary logic and rationalising in the judgements of some very senior lawyers (well highlighted by Justice Breyer in his dissenting judgement)—logic which makes you question whether the difficulties in protecting children are really all technical and legal, or just simply plain old issues of moral will. The moral will just does not seem to be there to let the Government do anything about a serious problem.
On the other hand, it is good to see software developers stepping in to give some help to worried parents. I recently downloaded a trial version of a web browser for children (for the Mac platform) called BumperCar, which looks to give a lot of helpful controls to parents over what gets viewed on their home computers. See http://www.freeverse.com/bumpercar/
Emma Thornett / 1st July 2004
Given what Kirsten Birkett said in her article, ‘Let us do anything, that good may come’ (Briefing #309), the following comment (sent in by a Briefing reader) is particularly interesting:
In his view supporting stem cell research, Chris Gatfield asks the question, “Would you deny the thousands of people who will benefit from this method of treatment?” (SMH letters 25/6/04).
A better question is, “Would we deny the tens of thousands of embryos who will benefit from being allowed to live, if we don't pursue this method of treatment?”
The answer to this question is, tragically, yes. The irony is that while our culture will make ethical decisions based on the majority of those whom they think will benefit, yet more embryos are killed than the number of people who will possibly/hopefully benefit from stem cell research. So even in a utilitarian framework (i.e. the best outcome for the greatest number of people), the proponents of stem cell research have still got it wrong. The majority don't benefit, because they are killed before they are even allowed to develop further and be born.
