Last Sunday, February 10th, Conservation Minister Chris Carter and his partner, Peter Kaiser, tied the knot in a civil union, attended by the Prime Minister, Cabinet ministers and other Labour MPs. So, what did the raving right have to rant about it? Chris Carter, Helen Clark and Peter Kaiser Despite their prolonged caterwauling about civil unions before the legislation was passed in December 2004, there was nary a flicker of interest from the Christian Right. Family Life International and the Society for Promotion of Community Standards had launched some highly objectionable character attacks on Chris and Peter at the time that they announced their intention to have an eventual civil union, but neither pressure group were heard to emit as much as a solitary sausage, and nor did elderly Wanganui ex-fundamentalist priest Garnet Milne. Nor did the Maxim Institute, Family First or any of the other usual suspects. That is, apart from two tiresome exceptions. One of them, Theolgy Online, asked "How Depraved Our Country Is Becoming." Ho hum. Why don't you ask those enthusiastic backers of non-consensual parental spanking with minors about that. The other is The Barking Mad Room, blogsite for that tragic tabloid gutter glossy, Investigrunt. Steeling my stomach, I had a look at the rightwing ravings in question. According to Wishart's offsider Andrei, this was all about the Subversion of Heterosexual Marriage! You see, Civil Unions Are Marriages In All But Name! Or it'll All End in Rationalisation of Marital Law! (Yes, but not until after we've dealt with adoption reform, and then probably not for a while). The blog editor then ruminated about the arcane plans of long deceased marxist figures such as Lenin, Trotsky andEngels to bring about the End of The Family! (They seem to have omitted Stalin, who recriminalised abortion and homosexuality in the USSR in the twenties. And what about the New Zealand Labour Party and its involvement with Rogernomics in the eighties?! ) Not onlydoconservative Christianshave a worldview of their own, it now seems that they inhabit their own bizarre parallel universe. Shades of the old DC comics cube-shaped Bizarro World, where imperfect duplicates of humans conducted themselves with grammatical difficulties and with invertedbehaviour to that of normal people... Never mind. Nuptial greetings and best wishes, Chris and Peter. Not Recommended: The Barking Mad Room http://www.tbr.cc Craig Young - 12th February 2007