The House of Representatives today took the extraordinary measure of apologising to Kiwis with historical criminal convictions for engaging in homosexual activity. The move was broadly welcomed, the general attitude suggesting that putting someone in a cage for an act that harmed no-one was, in hindsight, wrong.
Let’s be honest. What the New Zealand Government did to gay people wasn’t just wrong – it was a human rights abuse.
The reason why it qualifies as a human rights abuse is that humans have the inherent, inviolable right to do whatever they like as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else.
Engaging in consensual homosexual activity did not harm anyone else, therefore it wasn’t a crime. Therefore, putting gay people in cages for doing it was a human rights abuse.
After some decades of pressure from reasonable people, the New Zealand Parliament appears to have finally accepted this logic and apologised.
But the truly obscene thing about this whole affair isn’t men sticking their cocks up each other’s arses.
The truly obscene thing is how our current crop of gutless politicians, safely separated by thirty years of history, happily stick the boot into their forebears of a previous generation, while paying no mind to the fact that they are still oppressing cannabis users with the same total absence of justification as they once oppressed homosexuals.
So how can we take the Government’s apology for violating the human rights of homosexuals seriously when it continues to do exactly the same thing to cannabis users?
Marama Davidson, who never misses an opportunity to shamelessly grandstand, spoke in Parliament today about the deaths caused by the anti-homosexual prejudice engendered by the law criminalising homosexual activity.
But regarding the fact that prejudice and discrimination against medicinal cannabis users is still taking lives today, she (like everyone in Parliament apart from Julie Anne Genter) remains completely silent.
The cowards in Parliament won’t be making apologetic speeches about the damage caused by cannabis prohibition for another thirty years, not until most of the current lot are dead.
Grant Robertson stood up in Parliament today and said, on the subject of homosexuality being illegal, that “the arrests, the imprisonments and the fear of that happening did not just ruin lives and destroy potential – it killed people. Hundreds, possibly thousands of lives have been lost because men could not bear the shame, the stigma, and the hurt caused by this Parliament.”
Exactly the same words could be said about cannabis prohibition – but our politicians lack the courage to say them.
Justice Minister Amy Adams said “this apology is a symbolic but important act that we hope will help address the harm and right this historic wrong.”
If the New Zealand House of Representatives is serious about being apologetic for violating the human rights of Kiwi homosexuals, why are they continuing to violate the human rights of Kiwi medicinal cannabis users?
The prejudice against cannabis users – one that is enforced by the New Zealand Parliament to this very day – has taken ten times as many lives as the law against homosexuality and continues to take them.
Until the current Parliament takes the general issue of human rights seriously – not just rights for favoured, fashionable minorities – this apology can be dismissed as an exhibition of crocodile tears.
