Gordon McLauchlan: Overtaken by deja vu

After 15 years of never missing a week when the Herald was published on my day, Friday at first and then Saturday, I will write my last column next week, at least for some time.

Put together, the columns would total more than 600,000 words, each one sent to the paper from no matter where I was in the world.

Why give up now? Well, for more than one reason, but a powerful influence is that I have lately become victim of a niggling cynicism imposed by a sense of having passed this way before and having heard all the old arguments.

Perhaps my memory is too clear. When I was a young journalist, married couples who hated each other could gain a divorce in less than seven years only by committing adultery or some much more dire act.

Women were then bound economically within marriage once they had children, unless they simply walked out. That constituted desertion and gave all the power to the husband over the money and the children.

I can remember many a Monday morning at the Magistrates Court when a Senior Sergeant of police would try to persuade a woman who had been bloodied and battered at the weekend to press charges against her husband because he would probably do it again the following weekend.

The police could do almost nothing when they were called to domestics, and few women would even get as far as the court before having to decide that being a punchbag to a drunken coward was their lot in life.

But, when changes to the divorce laws were mooted, the same sort of opposition came from the churches that developed around the Civil Union Bill debate.

It would end traditional family life in this country and lead to widespread moral decline.

The case was built on the promulgation of fear. Most of us guessed that if it did end traditional family life then that was probably a good thing for large numbers of our citizens, especially thousands of wives and children. And it was.

Then came the Homosexual Law Reform Bill and more doom-laden predictions of moral havoc, marches in the streets against unnatural acts.

Raping and beating your wife was apparently a natural act, perhaps to be deplored but not as much as two people of the same sex making requited love.

We all knew that the churches were going to lose yet again when they declared the end of the family was nigh.

Has that legislation affected the family as an institution?

How many people would you muster for a march in favour of making homosexuality a criminal offence again? Only the fruitcakes from the fringe sects, I suspect.

Now we have seen the same rearguard action by the moralists over civil unions.

I've heard it all before, but I have tried and tried to think their case through. Anyone who dismisses the experience and long history of the Catholic Church, for example, would be foolish.

So I asked myself: will gay unions (or marriages for that matter) affect my marriage, my children or their marriages or my grandchildren's upbringing? And will it affect my beliefs, my attitude to other people?

The answer was no. I can't imagine any deleterious effect at all.

In fact, I can't convince myself the legislation has anything to do with me. It is simply freeing up other people to live as they wish.

ONE hopeful difference this time is that some Christians from mainstream churches have broken ranks and decided there is more good than bad in helping those who have for centuries been outcasts to come in from the cold.

Something that does intrigue me is that many of the same people who insist the only way ahead for our economic advancement is choice, choice and more choice line up with emphatic declarations on how people should have as little choice as possible on how they conduct their private lives.

They make it difficult to impose laws on the ethical behaviour of companies that frustrates innovation even if it may hurt many people.

But they are happy to dictate the sexual behaviour of people who are likely to harm no one.

So having listened to the high dudgeon of those trying to fatten thin arguments with torrents of words, I am overwhelmed, as I so often am these day, by deja vu.

Because the moral prefects are saying the same thing over and over again over many years, I am in danger of saying the same things I've been saying over and over again, and I have a very low boredom threshold.

So after next week, I'll leave the task to someone less wearied by the repetitious ranting of bores.

* Gordon McLauchlan in an Auckland journalist and author.