New Zealand Conservative

The above cartoon by Tom Scott was published in the Dominion Post on the Thursday morning last week following the final vote in Parliament to re(un)define marriage. Tom Scott's bias is obvious.  He refers to the bill as the "Marriage Equality Bill" rather than the Marriage Amendment Bill, and those 44 MPs who stood firm against the forces of imaged progress are drawn as dinosaurs, ie, of the type that will soon become extinct. Except, societies that don't restrict sexual activity to marriage (real marriage between a man and a woman) are the ones that will die out.  Really, Tom Scott's cartoon should have also shown the supposed "champions of progress" as barbarians , people who have inherited civilisation but don't really understand it and so will destroy it without even knowing they are doing so. From Judaism's Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism Rejected Homosexuality: Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymie...

From yesterday's Dominion Post, a swipe at Gareth Morgan and the potential consequence of his dreams of a bird utopia - being overrun by rats and mice: Of greater, more immediate concern to me as a cat owner is the inspiration Gareth Morgan is giving to cat hating sadists. A couple of Sundays ago, a woman wrote into the Sunday Star Times a horrible story of her grandfather having successfully used a gin-trap to deter cats from his garden, and how when recommending the method to her friend on the Kapiti Coast, the friend was keen to try the same remedy and now no longer has her garden visited by cats. Here's the letter: Feline solution MY FRIEND has a pristine lawn and landscaped garden at her home on Wellington's Kapiti Coast. She complains of neighbour's cats invading her property, fighting, copulating, urinating, defacating, vomiting and digging up recently sewn plants. Her pleas for a solution to the council and SPCA have been to no avail as they don...

I get what Tom Scott is trying to say here.  He's using Pope Benedict as the representative of the Christian world having to deal with constant satire, abuse and misrepresentation of the Christian faith, and so to the "angry protestors", the Pope says, "Harden up ..." However, in real life, despite some concerns for his safety, Pope Benedict XVI has just returned from a trip to Lebanon that he refused to cancel.  He spoke to all about the need for peace, instead of telling them to get used to the mockery.  Ironic, huh?

Really highlights our parliamentarians' priorities. The last cartoon by Hodgson that attracted my attention was the Paula Bennett and Dr Josef Mengele cartoon .

Considering that most New Zealanders support the Governments plans to offer free long term contraception to female beneficiaries and their older teenage daughters, the cartoon above from today's Dominion Post should really have had a mob with pitchforks rather than a lone Nazi wanting to butcher all and sundry. Related link : Free Birth Control wins Public Support ~ Stuff UPDATE 4:40 pm: KiwiBlog and Keeping Stock have published their own scanned copies ofthe cartoon now as well. They are outraged at it's offensiveness. I'm kind of meh... so used to offensive cartoons aimed at Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church and anything Catholic and/or Christian, that this is just another one those.

It seems my bunny post, calling into question the low standard of journalism displayed in last Wednesday's Editorial attacking the Catholic Church may have had an effect. Today's Dominion Post features a large article by Dr Edward Green (leading HIV researcher based at Harvard, mentioned in my post) called On condoms, the Pope may be right . The credit for the article is to the Washington Post, however it seems to have been modified for NZ readers. For instance the sentence in bold below was omitted from the NZ version of the first paragraph: When Pope Benedict XVI commented this month that condom distribution isn't helping, and may be worsening, the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa, he set off a firestorm of protest. Most non-Catholic commentary has been highly critical of the pope. A cartoon in the Philadelphia Inquirer, reprinted in The Post, showed the pope somewhat ghoulishly praising a throng of sick and dying Africans: "Blessed are the sick, for they have not used...