The New Zealand Christian Network has expressed horror and great sadness about the violent attacks today on Muslim people and mosques in Christchurch.
A spokesperson for the network, Dr Stuart Lange, said the attacks are “utterly appalling” and will be deplored by all New Zealand people of all faiths or none.
The network urges people to pray for all the families and communities which will be deeply affected, and to offer them support in every way possible.
New Zealand groups opposing euthanasia have come together in a movement to fight legislation in parliament that could soon legalise assisted suicide. #DefendNZ launched on March 10 with a website and video trailer introducing Kiwis who could be eligible for assisted suicide under a bill that could be passed in the current parliamentary session.
#DefendNZhas excellent background resources for the case against all forms of euthanasia.
Not satisfied with our mounting suicide rate – at a 10-year high in the year to June 2018 – the right-to-die lobby want to encourage the terminally ill and seriously disabled to think along those lines. It’s only about “the right to choose,” they say, but that is not how many of those living with disabilities and illness see it.
Over the next few weeks #DefendNZ will feature some of them in five mini-documentaries exploring the impact the End of Life Choice Bill would have on their relationships with their doctors and caregivers, on how society views and values their lives, on the way they feel about themselves, and on their safety. Former MP, Hon. Dame Tariana Turia DNZM will also share her perspectives in these documentaries.
The bill is a project of Act Party MP David Seymour. Mr Seymour, the sole representative of his party in parliament, is a libertarian who has taken up the cause of right-to-die advocates The cause received a major boost from the 2015 case of Lecretia Seales, a lawyer with terminal brain cancer who appealed to the High Court claiming a right to assisted suicide under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.
The Court’s finding, that there was no such right in the law, led to a petition to parliament to change the law, and a commission of inquiry attracting over 21,000 submissions – 80 percent of which were opposed to any form of euthanasia.
Another public consultation on Seymour’s bill brought a record 37,000 submissions last year and a large number of people wanting to be heard in person. The Justice Select Committee is due to report back to parliament by the end of this month. A huge majority of submitters – 92 percent — again oppose the bill.
Of particular concern is a clause permitting assisted suicide for a person with “terminal illness or grievous and irremediable condition.” A “grievous and irremediable condition” is defined as “degenerative, unable to be successfully treated, and very severe,” which has raised fears among people with disabilities about how their lives may be viewed in future.
In response, Seymour has proposed eliminating this provision from his bill, to the dismay of the euthanasia lobby. However, it will help keep the Greens, who are concerned about voters suffering disabilty, on board. Other changes include eliminating advance directives.
He has also “made explicit” that mental health conditions and disability alone do not allow a person to have a doctor kill them. To get the support of the New Zealand First MPs he says the issue should be the subject of a binding referendum at the next election.
The country has a proud record of ignoring referenda results, but to keep its coalition partner NZ First happy, Labour might go along with this one. It has already committed itself to a binding referendum on personal cannabis use at the 2020 election.
Seymour also proposes incorporating an Access to Palliative Care Bill sponsored by National MP Maggie Barry, and an amendment to protect the conscience rights of pharmacists, nurses and medical practitioners.
With these changes he hopes to get enough support in parliament – and, with any luck, the voting populace — to get the principle of a right to assisted suicide enshrined in law – after several failed attempts over the last few decades.
Whether that would do anything for the government’s promised wellbeing budget outcomes remains to be seen.
This article by Carolyn Moynihan was originally published on MercatorNet under a Creative Commons licence. The original article can be found here.
This article by Helen Houghton was originally posted by Family First New Zealand and has been republished with permission.
I started the petition in response to the Ministry of Education’s recent inclusion of transgender identity as part of the Health and Sexuality Curriculum. As a registered teacher, parent, and NZ taxpayer I object to social constructionist gender identity teachings taking precedence over established biological fact. I object to being branded as transphobic, simply for exercising my right to question critically what I as a teacher am being coerced into teaching to impressionable minds. I should be able safely to voice my human rights as an individual without being judged as transphobic or discriminatory.
Ironically, whilst accusing me of not accepting them and their worldview, opponents of my position are attempting to stereotype and pigeon-hole me and my supporters. It has been claimed that I might be someone who has led a sheltered life and is consequently threatened by people who are different from me. In fact, I currently have a number of roles in which I interact with and support a diverse range of people. I am a registered teacher, a psychology student, a parent, an advocate for women and a protector of children. As part of this advocacy, I work alongside a team of professionals who care for children who have suffered from extreme trauma. I also run a Charitable Trust, which supports women with parenting and educational programmes while empowering them to be the best version of themselves.
My reasons for lodging the petition are to highlight the act of gross negligence that the Ministry of Education undertook by posting on Facebook their plans of ‘Inclusive Education’ for one minority group, leaving all other groups subservient to this biased view.
The Ministry of Education published these intentions on the Te Kete Ipurangi site before consultation had taken place with the majority of teaching staff and principals.
A significant number of the education body was not made aware of the new Learning lntentions in the Health Curriculum, nor have many teachers been supplied with a copy of the Sexuality Curriculum guidelines, numerous resources linking to ideas of how to teach inclusiveness for LGBTQIA as well as links to YouTube videos of transgender youth have been suggested for use in our classrooms. There has been no stipulated age-appropriateness of the resources provided by Rainbow Youth and InsideOUT meaning any teacher could use them at will, with any age group level. I believe this undermines the professionalism of the high standard of code of ethics we as teachers are expected to uphold, yet those making policy decisions have failed to display them.
One of the headings within the Health Curriculum, on theTe Kete Irugangi site states; “Make LBTQAI content and themes visible across the curriculum then integrate LBTQAI” This allows no room for conscientious objectors to withdraw and therefore schools will not be safe and inclusive for all students. It should be noted that this is a requirement for all subjects to cover explicitly LBTQAI “content and themes”, therefore parental consent is assumed and does not have to be sought under National Educational Guidelines.
Gender stereotypes that are taught are not what ordinary mums and dads assume them to be., as multiple genders are taught as biological facts, including that a child can be neither male nor female. This is the sexualisation of our children under the guise of inclusivity and diversity. Many of the intentions are not age-appropriate. The learning intentions for each curriculum level are listed below:
Level 1 (5-7 Years old)
A4: Describing different types of families
(Mum’s new wife is picking me up from school today.)
D1 & 2: Dealing with bullying and harassment and speaking out for others (Turning children into Language Police and Trans-activists)
D2: Identifying locally available health care services
(How to get puberty blockers)
B2: Questioning and discussing gender stereotypes in games and physical activities
Level 3 (9-11 Years old)
D2: Exploring community events that celebrate and affirm
diversity (Having a nice family picnic at the Gay Pride Parade with its overt sexualisation)
Level 4 (11-13 Years old)
A4: Critiquing dominant messages about body image and body size,
and affirming diversity. (Note: Affirming diversity, not simply understanding it.)
D1: Critiquing gendered and sexualised media images
The prescribed curriculum teaching multiple genders undermines the human rights of individual teachers, many of whom hold different opinions about who should be discussing Gender Dysphoria with children. For the majority of teachers, being directed to enforce these controversial beliefs when they don’t believe them will create a learning culture of mistrust, not only within the education body but impacting crucial relationships of trust between student, parent and teacher. The integrity and moral principles of every teacher are being attacked. Teachers also do not have a right to go against the family values of their students, all the while instilling confusion into children, who are hearing misleading educational content. Research results illustrate the power of environmental influence on human development. Who can a child trust when the teacher is being forced to teach subject matter that is not age or developmentally appropriate? This in turn goes against our mission statement as schools, to provide a safe learning environment. It impacts on the rights of children to be children, instead of pawns in adult world debates.
We are interfering with nature by inserting into the curriculum an ideology that is not scientifically sound. The suggested Learning Intentions are not teaching acceptance but encouraging new gender options. This is no different from having an expectation for children, parents and society to conform to this social engineering. I don’t recall any time in the history of our education system that we have adopted classical conditioning as a teaching tool in our democratic country.
This article by Helen Houghton was originally posted by Family First New Zealand and has been republished with permission.
The other country where euthanasia for children is legal—Colombia
The long process of legalisation began in 1997
Colombia is not a nation that one associates with end-of-life debates, but it is one of the few which has legalised euthanasia – even for children over 6 years old. Perhaps the issue has flown under the radar because many Colombians are Catholics or Evangelicals for whom euthanasia is anathema.
The process began in 1997 when Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled that ending lives in certain circumstances was not illegal. In Sentencia C-239/97 it stated: “Nothing is more cruel than to force a person to survive in the midst of shameful suffering, in the name of other people’s beliefs.”However, this still left the legal status of assisted suicide and euthanasia in a legal limbo. Activists could not be sure that they would not be prosecuted.
And then, in 2017 (Sentencia T-544) the Court ordered the Department of Health and Social Protection to issue regulations which would “guarantee the right to death worthy of children and adolescents”. So on March 9, 2018, the Department of Health and Social Protection issued Resolution 825 which allowed euthanasia for children over 6. The Department explained that before that age children cannot grasp the idea of their own death. However, children between the ages of 7 and 12 are allowed access euthanasia with the approval of their parents. Children between 12 and 14 can access it even if one parent disagrees. After 14, no parental involvement is needed, provided that all the requirements for euthanasia are fulfilled.
Like adults, the child must have an incurable condition, have unmanageable pain and the mental capacity to consent. “Doing this for children is a whole new world,” Ricardo Luque Nunez, a doctor and bioethicist who is an adviser to the Colombian Ministry of Health and oversees this issue, told the Globe and Mail.
According to official records only 40 people have taken advantage of Colombia’s euthanasia regulations. Unofficially, there may be many more. As in other countries, activist doctors who are impatient with red tape take the law into their own hands. One doctor claims that he has “provided euthanasia” to almost 400 people, including more than 30 children.
Colombian voters have had no say in this momentous legal change. “We have not had a big national debate about this, and I’m not very happy about it,” says a former Colombian health minister. “We need a public debate: We are not Belgium or Holland – this is at odds with people’s beliefs and mode of thought.”
This website provides links to a number of international articles and documents pertaining to euthanasia, assisted suicide advance directives, disability rights, pain control and more.
This article by Michael Cook was originally published on MercatorNet under a Creative Commons licence. The original article can be found here.
Euthanasia: False Light
International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide (2009) This video looks at euthanasia and assisted suicide through the eyes of five people — three patients, a doctor, and a hospice nurse, all of whom speak from their hearts, not from a script.
The only person that I trusted was my doctor. And to have my doctor walk into the room and say, “I’m going to give you the choice to just end all this right now.”
Patient
And it’s a lot easier to push people out of the picture then to actually get involved with them and suffer with them. Which, by the way, is what the word compassion means. It means it means to suffer with. If you kill somebody, there is no ‘with’. You’re not compassionate if somebody’s dead.
We are really grateful to God for all he is doing in the city of Hastings. A good number of the Pastors in the city gather together once a month on a Tuesday morning to pray, study the Word of God and fellowship.
There have been monthly gatherings where we have had leaders representing 20 different churches present, crossing many different denominational lines. There is a growing sense of unity amongst the leaders of the churches, where we are not threatened by one another but are praying for each other, helping one another and choosing to speak well of one another.
Outside of our monthly gatherings, we hear reports of Pastors meeting with other Pastors to encourage one another and learn from one another. Some great friendships and levels of trust have developed and are developing, where we genuinely want to see each other blessed and see our city transformed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We have had a number of stories of churches blessing other churches in the city, even financially!
One testimony which has happened in the last 2 years is that one church was given $30,000 by another church in the city.
This gave the church that received the finance the final resources they were trusting God for to buy a building!
So God used one church to answer the prayers of another church to the tune of $30,000. God is certainly at work in our city and surely these are all the seeds for a city-wide and even region-wide revival!
“Is the world getting better, worse or staying the same?”
If you think it is getting worse, you’re in good company. The majority of audiences in 30 countries who were asked this question believed that things were indeed getting worse in our world. Among Christians too, many are predisposed to a negative perspective as wars, famines, persecutions and earthquakes have always been stuff of end-time scenarios.
But is this true? Or do most of us have a distorted worldview? Until his death two years ago, Swedish health professor Hans Rosling battled deeply-rooted misconceptions held by top academics, economists, UN officials, politicians, military brass and journalists concerning the state of the world, in boardrooms, lecture halls, and forums from Davos to TED talks.
A medical doctor with vast hands-on experience in many countries, Rosling challenged his listeners to seek out the facts and develop a lifestyle of what he called ‘Factfulness’, the title of the book he completed in the last months of his life.
Yesterday in the first Boekhoek (bookcorner) of this year in the Upper Room salon in Amsterdam, we examined some of the facts Rosling would present to his audiences about bad things decreasing, like the following: • extreme global poverty has fallen from 85% in 1800 to 9% in 2017, the biggest drop from 50% happening since 1966. • average life expectancy has risen from 31 years in 1800 to 72 years in 2017.
• today there are no countries with a life expectancy below 50 years. • in 1800, 44% of children died before the age of 5 years, but in 2016 only 4% died. • battle deaths per 100,000 people was 201 in 1942, but today is merely 1. • plane crash deaths per 10 billion passenger miles over 5-year averages was 2100 in 1929-1933, but 2012-16 was 1. • deaths from disasters annually over 10-year averages per million people was 453 in the 1930s, reduced to 10 over the period 2010-16. • child labour of those 5-14 years working full-time under bad conditions dropped from 28% in 1950 to 10% in 2012. • nuclear arms reached a peak of 64,000 warheads in 1986 but was reduced to 15,000 in 2017. • 148 countries had cases of smallpox in 1850, yet smallpox was eradicated by 1979. • world hunger has dropped from 28% of people undernourished in 1970 to 11% in 2015.
Facts about good things increasing that Rosling would tell his audiences included: • cereal harvests (tonnes per hectare) have increased from 1.4 in 1961 to 4 in 2014. • adult literacy has increased from 10% in 1800 to 86% in 2016. • the share of humanity living in a democracy has risen from 1% in 1816 to 56% in 2015. • the countries with equal voting rights from women and men was 1 in 1893, but today is 193. • child cancer survival has risen from 58% in 1975 to 80% in 2010. • the share of girls enrolled in primary schools was 65% in 1970 and in 2015 was 90%. • one-year-olds vaccinated at least once have risen from 22% in 1980 to 88% in 2016. • those with access to water from a protected source is 85% in 2015, up from 58% in 1980.
Our problem, Rosling pinpointed, was our tendency to notice the bad more than the good, our ‘negativity instinct’. We tended to romanticise the past into the ‘good old days’. Lack of memory in our ‘now’ culture robbed us of proper reference points. Our news media bombarded us with negative news from all across the world, he wrote: ‘wars, famines, natural disasters, political mistakes, corruption, budget cuts, diseases, mass layoffs, acts of terror’. Our surveillance of suffering had improved tremendously, yet stories about gradual improvements impacting millions of lives didn’t make the front pages. Activists and lobbyists made it their business to create alarm, and thus raise funding, for their causes.
Politicians, journalists and terrorists also exploit the ‘fear instinct’. While terrorism has increased worldwide, it has decreased in the richer nations (less than 1500 were killed from 2007-2016, a third of the number killed in the previous decade); most of the increase has been in Iraq (about half), Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria. The ‘blame instinct’ is another factor giving us a distorted worldview, said Rosling, the instinct to find a simple reason why something bad has happened, when in fact the causes are usually more complicated.
Rosling was a man of deep humanitarian and humanist compassion. As far as I know, he did not write as a Christian. Yet, despite criticism of its ‘one-sidedness’, Factfulness challenges our world perceptions deeply. His passion for those still trapped in poverty and sickness is evident in his many Youtube videos. He unmasks many of the populist arguments which create fear of foreigners and scapegoat outsiders, and which too many Christians find attractive.
As we have written earlier, the progress he describes is indebted to values spread globally by the missionary movement. Surely there is some overlap between the advance of human wellbeing and flourishing he maps and the biblical concept of ‘shalom’, within the framework of God’s common grace, creating conditions for the gospel to be spread.
And that’s worth a prayer of thanks.
Fountain’s Weekly Word – originally published here
My reasons for lodging the petition are to highlight the act of gross negligence that the Ministry of Education undertook by posting on Facebook their plans of ‘Inclusive Education’ for one minority group, leaving all other groups subservient to this biased view.
