Publicity stunt

An anti-gay, right-wing NZ religious-based “family” group is seeking to capitalise on a recent high-profile case of extreme child abuse to promote itself. It’s sponsoring a publicity stunt tomorrow urging people to “stand up against child abuse”, apparently without any irony at all.

The group, called “Family First NZ”, was a leading opponent of the recently enacted ban on smacking children.

It may seem a bit rich for a group that promoted the right of parents to use “reasonable force” (the defence in the law they were trying to preserve) against their children to now urge people to stand up for three minutes in “a symbolic ‘stand’ against child abuse”. The joint statement issued with other supporters of the stunt says, among other things:

We are sick and tired of doing nothing while our babies and children are being beaten and murdered… We have allowed political correctness to get in the way of speaking the truth… We have allowed a succession of policies over the last 30 years to diminish the significance of family structure.

They hardly “did nothing”: They promoted the right of parents to smack their children as long as it was “reasonable force”. In so doing, they promoted a climate where people think it’s okay to beat their children—even if they have no concept of what’s “reasonable force”.

And doesn’t some of that rhetoric sound awfully familiar? What are they really all about?

The group’s registration with the Charities Commission includes “religious activities” as one of its charitable purposes, and it’s easy to see what political viewpoint those religious activities promote. Consider these excerpts from their “Principles on Family” (PDF available here), in which they seek to define “family” by affirming:

1. …that the natural family, not the individual, is the fundamental social unit.
2. …the natural family to be the union of a man and a woman through marriage…
3. …the natural family is a fixed aspect of the created order… the natural family cannot change into some new shape; nor can it be re-defined by eager social engineers.
4. …the natural family is the foundational family system. While we acknowledge varied living situations caused by circumstance or dysfunction, all other “family forms” are incomplete or fabrications of the state.
6. …the marital union to be the authentic sexual bond…
7. …the sanctity of human life from conception to death…
9. …the world is abundant in resources. The breakdown of the natural family and the consequential moral and political failure, not human “overpopulation,” account for poverty, starvation, and environmental decay.

Okay, I only put the last one in because it’s so truly nutty: Climate change is happening, they say, because their “natural family” is breaking down. Yeah, okay then…

In general, the group promotes the same fundamentalist christianist political positions as a similarly named group in Australia, along with any number of groups in the US. In addition to opposing same-sex marriage (and even civil unions, which they dismissed as “a total waste of time”) and same-sex families, they’re also anti-abortion, anti-“pornography” and—like all right wing christianist groups—oppose the vaccine against cervical cancer because giving it to girls “is like giving a 12 year old a condom and saying ‘just in case’.” Apparently the fact that their daughters may become infected with HPV, the virus that causes cervical cancer, doesn’t matter to them.

“Family First”? Give me a break. They’re just another right-wing christianist group promoting their political-religious viewpoint. In principle, I have no problem with that. Freedom of speech demands that they have the right to promote their views, no matter how loony I might think they are.

But I do object to a group that advocated the right of parents to smack their children now promoting some phoney publicity stunt as if it would actually do anything to stop child abuse. Most of all, I object to the mainstream media letting them get away with it.