Observant readers will have noted that our front page section which was recently titled Politics has been re-titled Politics and Religion. Maybe that combination seems a little odd to you? In fact it's based on a political and religious reality that GayNZ.com predicts will see your sexuality, life and security publicly trashed time and time again this year. Tucked away in the shadowy corridors of power and influence the politics and religion are fusing closer and closer together when it comes to “moral issues,” especially those affecting NZ's glbt citizens. And in the coming months we are likely to see the extreme religious right make even more moves to influence our elected officials and the parliamentary process. The pattern is already there. Actually there are two patterns which are rapidly merging together, one is local to New Zealand and the other is offshore. As John Campbell and Jacquie Brown reminded us with their TV3 Queen's Tour series there once was a time that the whole nation turned on an orgy of adulation and reverence when even minor royalty chose the leave the UK and bless us with their presence. We slavishly practised waving and cheering and curtseying and studied the fashions and manners of their highnesses like addicts. No more. As a nation we no longer need princesses and dukes to show us how to dress, archbishops to tell us how to think or popes to proscribe what we do in the privacy of our adult bedrooms. The British royals are accepting their diminished role in grown up countries like New Zealand with fairly good grace, the mainstream religious leaders are not. For decades they have been crying wolf on moral issues and now only the terminally pious or the sadly insecure pay much attention any more. Like fading empires the mainstream conservative religions are struggling to define their changing role in NZ's more confident, secular society and it's perhaps sad to see the desperate tactics they are adopting to appear relevant. Their claims that NZ would run rampant with sodomy and kiddie fiddling have been seen to be groundless scaremongering of the “you will roast in the fires of hell for all eternity unless you substitute fish for meat on Fridays” variety. ( I won't even get into the fact that the most blatant sexual abuse of children has been revealed to be by non-homosexuals within religious organisations!) On the conservative side of mainstream politics a similar problem has emerged. Once robust and respected right-wing parties have been consigned to the political wasteland by the Labour juggernaut. The nation hasn't gone to rack and ruin under a Labour government and to the surprise of many Labour shows no signs of following its usual historical cycle of riding a crest of public appeal into government then conveniently self-destructing a few years later. So if the political right can't rely on Labour to self-destruct before the next election and can't score any meaningful points by criticising its economic performance it'll have to rely on the only other reliable point-scorer, morality/law and order. And its in the morality part that the conservative religions have seen their chance. Already someone has got to National's Don Brash who hitherto sounded like a voice of reason. His odious column in the Herald a few days ago claiming that Labour had no mandate for pushing through the Civil Unions legislation seemed to overlook the human rights legislation which his own party signed up to a decade or so ago. That was the mandate and he knows it but he's ensuring that National's growing links with the religious conservatives - who would like see the state sanction only the one form of relationship they agree with but sadly themselves don't support in any meaningful way judging by divorce and defacto statistics - are nurtured. And while National, and to some extent ACT, the voices of the “reasonable” political right, position themselves our increasingly self-righteous extreme right politicians are starting to play the same game, only more stridently. Ditto the extreme religious right is working itself up to a hysteria of moralising and political skullduggery. The links are being established, the relationships are forming, their marriages of convenience are about to be consummated in the lead-up to the election. Both the political and religious right are desperate to win, to prove they they have some degree, any degree, of relevancy in today's changed society. But there's a third factor lurking behind this unholy alliance: the influence of extreme-right fundamentalist groups in the USA who are trying to use New Zealand's religious right to mould our society in their preferred image. For decades they have quietly insinuated themselves into the American political right to the point where they (along with the National Rifle Association and more especially Big Oil/Big Business) practically dictate the Republican party's every move and George Bush's every utterance. They appear to have learned from the CIA that pouring actual money into “friendly” agencies in foreign countries is a public relations time bomb so they're more subtle. They “assist” rather than pay NZ's Maxim Institute to run its seminars and programmes in religious-right double-talk. They buy Destiny's Tamaki a motorbike and host him on a neat USA “speaking trip” rather than pay him outright. And they are only too happy to see the screeds of distorted junk research and vitriol they generate at their own expense cut and pasted free of charge off the internet into our expanding galaxy of ultra-conservative little church groups', and extreme right politicians', local diatribes. Sound far fetched? Consider how the “gays and lesbians are more likely to abuse and murder their children” line recently came to be proclaimed by the very religious mayor of Auckland and his little posse of co-letter-signers. Where do the vicious inanities mouthed by “god-fearing” Paul Adams MP and his ilk originate and how are they routed to his receptive mind? With general elections likely some time around October this year, expect this unholy alliance of American religious extremism, New Zealand religious conservatism and New Zealand political right desperation to dump all over the recent “fair and equal” society gains made by glbt folk, and other easy-target minorities, in an attempt to bring down Labour. This unholy alliance of right-wing politics and ultra-conservative religion has started to try to heave the political and social pendulum back a hundred years to recapture their glory days when church and state were practically one. Conservative elements of Politics and Religion are already fusing together for the battle of their lives. On GayNZ.com's front page we've merely followed their lead. Jay Bennie - 16th January 2005