I purchased Spring 2004's Evidence today. So what did the Maxim Institute's 'policy journal' have to say for itself? Not much. Greg Fleming provided the most amusing section when he worried that the Civil Union Bill was 'selling our children short.' However, there was one problem with this assertion, which was that he advanced no social scientific evidence that stable same-sex relationships do not provide suitable contexts for parenting. More amusingly, he cited a conversation with someone else about same-sex marriage - which was reproduced verbatim from one of Maggie Gallagher's diatribes about same-sex marriage on the Maxim website! I know that the New Zealand Christian Right is dependent on its American counterparts for everything but financial support, but this is ridiculous. Is there a commandment that orders fundamentalists not to footnote properly, or acknowledge others copyright status, one wonders? Then Samuel Gregg offered his perspective on the 'impossibility of amoral law.' Gregg is a spokesperson for the social conservative and free-market-oriented conservative Catholic organisation known as the Acton Institute. Predictably, he talked about the conservative Catholic version of natural law theory as the only legitimate basis for legislating morality. Translated into plain English, this means that liberal, secular and democratic societies should impose a sectarian moral code and ignore issues of religious freedom and harm related to their version of 'natural law theory.' And of course, they'd even relitigate issues like heterosexual contraceptive access, recriminalise homosexuality, etc. Never mind that contemporary secular natural law scholarship argues that all humans are created with intrinsic, natural rights that the archaic conservative Catholic version ignores. Never mind that conservative Catholic natural law theory ignores secular physical and social sciences in its anti-democratic prescriptions for an authoritarian social order. Still, it's nice that the Maxim Institute has fallen into a trap over this issue, given that it is absurdly easy to refute 'natural law' assertions. Assertions have no valid scientific or social scientific basis. They are not "evidence." Finally, I'll turn to Maxim's attempt to persuade the rest of us that there's a 'baby bigot' boom. Uh huh. There's only one problem with this prognosis, and that's census data. In fact, the New Zealand Census of Population and Dwellings showed quite the opposite trend, which showed increased secularisation of youth, or resort to anti-authoritarian value and belief systems like Wicca. As I've noted beforehand, the Christian Right's youth contingent do it with mirrors, and have overlapping staffs. They've often attended fundamentalist schools, or been born to fundamentalist parents, or inhabit areas of high fundamentalist influence (eg Hamilton), and metaphors about musical chairs occur to one. There is no 'baby bigot boom' out there, because even fundamentalist kids defect to secularism, as the Institute's own "Compass" website so rightly observed. Amazing, though. One would've thought that the Institute would do much more to derail the Civil Union and Relationship (Statutory References) Bills than this. Recommended Reading: http://www.maxim.org.nz Maxim Institute website. http://www.compass.org.nz Maxim Institute's "Compass" youth indoctrination camps (Late January, Snells Beach, Auckland). http://www.acton.org US Acton Institute (conservative Catholic pressure group) Evidence articles: Greg Fleming: "Selling Our Kids Short" Evidence 11 (Spring 2004): 10-11. Samuel Gregg: "On the Impossibility of 'Amoral' Law" Evidence 11 (Spring 2004): 36-42. Andrew Shamy: "The New Conservatives" Evidence 11 (Spring 2004): 43-48. Rebuttal to Shamy's Article: Statistics New Zealand: New Zealand Census of Populations and Dwellings: Statistics New Zealand: Wellington: 2002. Craig Young - 22nd September 2004