New Zealand Conservative

cf Whaleoil

During an 80 minute interview with journalists, when Pope Francis was apparently asked about gay people, he answered “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Pope Francis' answer to the question has been reported all over the place - but not the actual question itself.  This has lead to excitement in some quarter that Pope Francis is somehow changing the direction of the Catholic Church on her attitude towards homosexuals. Misinformation is being spread, mainly through is this AP article , regurgitated by news sources such as Stuff, with quotes such as the following: Gay leaders were buoyed by Francis' non-judgmental approach, saying changing the tone was progress in itself, although for some, the encouragement was tempered by Francis’ talk of gay clergy's ''sins". ''Basically, I'm overjoyed at the news," said Francis DeBernardo, executive director of the US-based New Ways Ministry, a grou...

A visiting American expert on historic buildings talks about the partially destroyed Catholic Christchurch Basilica: The cathedral was still "incredibly beautiful", McNamara said. "It's very sombre and melancholy of course - but I could see the beauty and sophistication in this architecture, and it really stands out as a fine building anywhere. "Even in the churches that you see ... in other parts of the world, to have this stone exterior instead of brick, to have these grand colonnades on the inside that are natural stone and not just plaster, reflects that it's at the higher end of buildings of its type. "You could tell coming down the street something grand, valuable and important was here. I wish I'd been here to see it in its full glory." With the cathedral's fate still to be decided, McNamara was reluctant to declare that it should be rebuilt. He said grand architecture was at the heart of Catholic worship. "It is an in...

A royal baby is always good news, and today New Zealand woke up to the announcement that a new heir to the throne was born. A little boy. I'm personally quite pleased about this. The royal family of Britain (and New Zealand) is doing well, and a new baby is a great way for them to keep up their popularity. Babies always bring their own luck with them (according to the Greek takeaways guys who tried to convince me years ago to have another baby), and I now realise with hindsight and much more life experience that those Greek guys were right. A baby is a blessing, and many babies multiply those blessings. Our world needs to rediscover that married men and women create babies, and that it is good, and that we should have more. Maybe the Royal Baby will inspire a baby boom. Whatever one might think of the Royals, their continual existence is important. They are a link to the past and as such are hated by modernists who would replace them with a republic. You can't make...

A civil marriage service is not a "proper wedding" which can only take place in a Church. How do we know? ZM’s breakfast host, Polly Gillespie has told us so "This is a momentous occasion for New Zealand. If we went with a civil service and then a blessing in St Matthew’s as the Anglican Church has suggested, we’d effectively be saying everyone’s equal but some are more equal than others. That’s not good enough for us at ZM. We want our royal themed wedding to be a proper wedding , which means a marriage ceremony, not a blessing or anything less than that. ZM will deliver on this. We are left with no alternative but to move the ceremony elsewhere, so we’re on the hunt for another church!" This could be a teaching opportunity for the Anglican Church on the nature of Christian marriage but given their own confusion over these matters it will be missed

A Catholic doctor in New Zealand has denied a 23 year old engaged woman the contraceptive pill and now it's made the news . David Farrar is appalled, for the doctor was apparently not doing his duty by the patient.  Many men prefer their women on contraception it seems, maybe because the contraceptives act in such a way to make less masculine men more attractive .  Contraception does not fix a medical problem , however, no matter how unattractive the man.  The capacity to bear children is in itself not a disease that needs to be cured. Having children is in fact, the primary difference between men and women, even though some women will never have children.  So, for a doctor, denial of contraception is not denying health care as such, as it is denying women a medical means of neutering themselves and aborting any children they might conceive. For yes, even on contraception, women can conceive children , it's just that their  bodies are unable to nurture th...

My title is chosen from within the article I've linked to. It refers to the child's pain of being different, of not having a mother or a father, and to have to put on a brave face to the world, because that is what is expected of them. This is personal for the writer, Robert Oscar Lopez, because he knows what it's like to be raised by two lesbians. He's one of the very few that are now grown and are able to talk and write about their experiences. He considers two men or two women bringing a child into their relationship on purpose to be abusive. Worst of all is a same-sex parenting home that arose because two homosexuals contrived the situation knowingly, in order to experience parenting . These are cases in which divorce was initiated by a gay spouse, with the explicit goal of setting up a new gay parenting household, and then custody was transferred (often in an ugly family court process). Or where lesbians went to a sperm bank. Or where two homosexuals ...

Every once in a while I delete blogs from my sidebar that haven't been active for a long time. A long time being defined as anything more than eight months or so. Today's clean up removed Dad4Justice and PinkoFreeZone . If either of those blogs come back to life, please let me know and I'll add them back again. As always, the blog list does not reflect the blog's authors' views on anything. A link to a blog does not mean endorsement of that blog. A number of the blogs on the blog list will not link to this blog for various reasons, but that does not stop me from linking to them. Kudos to the HandMirror , with whom I disagree with on just about everything, for showing me that this was possible by their own policy of linking to women bloggers, despite what they blog about. I've also added another NZ blog to the list: Wonderful Now . The blogger reminds me of the woman in Luke 7:47 .

A couple of weeks ago I was wanting to read something worthwhile, and even thought to myself that it would be good if I could find something on Kindle.  I was thinking of fiction rather than non-fiction, as I seem to read quite a few non-fiction books and very little fiction, so I was really wanting a story. All of this thinking occurred just before bedtime, and as I normally do at night, in the process of closing down my computer, I just had a last look around.   A post on our sidebar caught my eye by Te Deum laudamus! , Book Review | The Price to Pay: A Muslim Risks All to Follow Christ : The Price to Pay grabs you by the seat of your pants right on the first page and doesn't let go until you are done. It begins in Iraq in the late 1980's with a Muslim man from a tribe with considerable esteem who encounters an Iraqi Catholic while in mandatory military service. Without spoiling it, suffice it to say, that after initially having a serious aversion to the guy, h...

New Zealand has a large parasite class - much of it domiciled in Wellington. Here is a prime example a Professor of Public Policy, no less Here is an sample of his thought processes "The current New Zealand Government, for instance, is only too eager to proclaim the virtues of our country's favourite brands - clean and green, 100 per cent pure - but the very same government is pursuing policies on multiple fronts that are making an absolute mockery of such brands," he said during a panel discussion. "Examples include the severe weakening of the emissions trading scheme, the vigorous endorsement of onshore and offshore mining of fossil fuels with no mention of carbon capture and storage, reduced public funding for DOC, huge investments in new roads rather than public transport, the inefficient expansion of urban boundaries, and numerous proposed changes to the Resource Management Act designed to lower environmental standards, fast-track major projects and limi...

This will upset the liberals who imagined that Francis might support same-sex unions. The message loud and clear is that he doesn't - marriage can only ever be between one man and one woman. ROME, July 5, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In his first encyclical letter, released this morning, Pope Francis has reiterated that marriage is a union of one man and one woman for the procreation and nurturing of children. This lifelong pledge is possible only in the light of a greater plan for marriage, he said: “Promising love for ever is possible when we perceive a plan bigger than our own ideas and undertakings, a plan which sustains us and enables us to surrender our future entirely to the one we love.” Titled Lumen Fidei (The Light of Faith), the encyclical is known to have been authored mainly by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who was still working on it at the time of his abdication and it strongly reflects the theological style of Francis’ predecessor. In his introduction, Pope Fr...

A book that should be brown paper-bagged and left there to rot has netted writer Ted Dawe a $7500 prize. Ted Dawe’s Into the River claimed top prize in the annual New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards. The author makes no apology for the provocative content , saying the story needs to be told, even at the risk of upsetting parents and booksellers. One scene describes, in extensive detail, two adolescents having fumbling sex in shallow water. Award organisers have sent “explicit content” stickers to all booksellers to warn potential buyers. The 2013 Kiwi Kids’ Good Book Guide lists the book’s target age as 13 years and over but Masterton Paper Plus says the book is only suitable for those over 15. The Conservative has an excerpt of the "fumbling sex", and has suggested a more appropriate title for the book. I won't post the excerpt here, as I don't even want to look at it, yet alone have to put blockquote tags around it and have it on the blog. Su...

There is a very interesting blog post HERE by a minister on the dissertation he gave at a theological seminary. He interviewed Christian husbands who had (or still have) same-sex attraction and their responses are very interesting about what makes traditional marriage to a woman different and unique. There are those who can teach us the difference between “intergendered” unions (between two people of different genders) and “monogendered” unions (between those of the same gender). In fact, there are plenty of them in our churches. Sadly, they get ignored, insulted, or shunned, yet they are the ones before whom we should all be quiet and listen. Who, you ask? Simply those who feel long-term same-sex attraction (SSA), and who may have even acted on those feelings in gay relationships in the past but who came to decide, in their Christian commitment, to marry the opposite gender instead. Ex-gay Christians who have been happily married for years are the best instructors what the diff...